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The catch is that C# and CLR are not open standards - they are just ECMA standards.

The catch is that C# and CLR are not open standards - they are just ECMA standards.

They are actually ISO standards now. If that's not standard enough, I don't know what is...

Where's ANSI/ISO C#?

Right here

Where's ANSI/ISO .NET

Right Here

You were saying?

Where's ANSI/ISO C#?

Right here

Where's ANSI/ISO .NET

Right Here

You were saying?

Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)

The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...

Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).

You should care that it's XML...

In fact, it's probably worse here. Although our DD/MM/YY is relatively sane, if you see documents on the web you've often no way of telling if they're UK-style DD/MM/YY or US-style MM/DD/YY.

For a long while I used the first three letters of the month instead of its number where possible (and included the century), which makes things unambiguous, but it still doesn't sort properly.

So these days I use YYYY-MM-DD almost everywhere. It sorts properly, it's logical, it's unambiguous, it's neat, and it's an international standard (hint: the 'I' in 'ISO'...), so it should be acceptable everywhere they count years in the same way we do!

The only real issues with it are 1) it makes date intervals awkward, and 2) it's much longer than a simple D/Mmm for near dates. But you can't have everything*.

(* Coz if you did, it'd probably undergo gravitational collapse and end up as a black hole, and then you'd look a bit of a fool...)

The whole point is that the organisation decides what quality standard(s) it is required to meet (for example under government regulations or industry standards), what extra measures it chooses to meet, and documents these and the processes involved. A system of documentating the outcomes of the processes plus internal audits, is overseen by external auditing that checks the organisation is doing what it has said needs to be done. That's ISO 9001.

You'll notice that the quality system is essentially self-managed.

And if there are any problems with adoption, they could call in the president of ISO, who knows a thing or two about units of measurement.

It is an Open Standard. Visit the ISO website and download the standards yourself if you arent satisfied. The ISO standards numbers are 23270(C#), 23271(CLI), and 23272(CLI TR)

Pwned.

Photography - Electronic still-picture cameras - Resolution measurements

ISO 12233:2000 paper version (en) CHF 116,00

116.00 CHF Switzerland Francs = 94.2233 USD United States Dollars

Never mind - my goof...

While W3C has not made HTML a standard, the ISO and IEC apparently have standardised "a refinement of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Recommendation for HTML 4.0 ... Documents which conform to this International Standard also conform to the strict DTD provided by the W3C Recommendation for HTML 4.01."

Never mind - my goof...

While W3C has not made HTML a standard, the ISO and IEC apparently have standardised "a refinement of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Recommendation for HTML 4.0 ... Documents which conform to this International Standard also conform to the strict DTD provided by the W3C Recommendation for HTML 4.01."

--
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OK - how's this?

Back in April, Slashdot reported the announcement of a Universal 3D File Format by Intel, Microsoft & others - to be "as open as MP3". Of course, that's not all that open. And this turns out to be the sneaky part. There is a real open standard already - X3D is ISO-ratified, royalty-free, and has multiple open source implementations. U3D is "going to be submitted to ISO" - one day - but right now they're talking to ECMA, which allows royalty-bearing patents.
I found this article by Tony Parisi, co-chair of the X3D Working Group a fascinating insider's picture of the standards wars, along with insights into what it takes to release an online game, what really killed VRML, and why open standards do (and don't) matter.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore


BTW, I need to get a life.

in true slashdot bashing style. Haha!
i kinda wonder if linux offends accidentally or not tho.

Actually, the well-known Debian developer Herbert Xu resigned recently due to being offended by project members discussing (in the context of the new Debian installer) whether or not to refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan, Province of China" as it is officially designated in ISO 3166.

So this sort of problem is certainly not restricted to commercial or proprietary software.

As I was saying to your child poster the royalty for mpeg4-aac is about 52 cents for the codec.

royalties: http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lice nse.terms.html
spec: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Cata logueDetail?CSNUMBER=36083&ICS1=35&ICS2=40&ICS 3=

Microsoft's sample product and royalty schedule says 25 cents for audio codec plus another 25 cents to network read (stream).

That's a 2 cent difference.

The licensing agreement also includes verbage that says 'you will also pay a royalty schedule for Plays Windows Media Logo License' ... so maybe that's where the scales tip past the 2 cents.

Anyhow, MS says, "oooo WMA costs half as much as mpeg-4 for video!!"... makes you wonder why it's not an ISO if it's so great and cheap.

If you are a WMA licensee I'd be interested to know what your real costs are.

They just chose to call their standards "recommendations" just not to annoy anyone.

like real standards bodies perhaps ?

Once again, your brain fails to do any research. A simple Google search would show that AAC is in fact an *INDUSTRY* standard defined by both the ISO and IEC.

That means it's an OPEN standard that ANYONE can use.

In short, your ignorance and hatred of Apple is clearly manifest and thus not suitable for discussion among normals.

*YOU HAVE LOST*.

I think you may mean ISO-9660?

details here

ISO 9960 seems to be: Draughting instruments with or without graduation -- Part 1: Draughting scale rules

YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard. ISO 8601:2000

Honestly, HTML is a decent precedent for XML. Sure the structure is less ordered, and not so clearly delineated between logical/structral and layout/presentation halves. But the idea of using containing tags to structure text has been around since at least SGML in 1986.

Let's hope that this patent applies to a specific implementation of XML, such as the form:

<this>

<blob type="patented_binary_thingy"/>

</this>

Heh.

Actually ISO does have a standard for time (ISO 8601).
<date> = yyyymmdd
four-digit year (yyyy), two-digit montho (mm), and two-digit day (dd). Use Gregorian calender.
<time> = hhmmss
two-digit hour (hh), two-digit minute (mm), at least two-digit second (ss). Note that second is floating point, so it could be something like 02.12836192 if that level of precision is required.

For specifying date and time together, use this format:
<date>T<time>

More details of the format are available. There are also many more resources avalable on-line that detail the isues involved with international time and extensibility. Furthermore, most databases have already had to tackle this problem. You will find their solutions to be similar.

Please mod this up if for no other reason because I took the time to properly format the HTML even with all the "Character references" needed for the angle brackets.

doesn't the A in ASCII stand for American?

So instead of ANSI don't we need a INSI (I standing for international) standard?

That sounds like a very good idea. To make it shorter, we could call it ISO (International Standards Organization). Yeah, what a terrific idea. Let's get a domain name straight away. Maybe iso.org? Sounds cool? Well someone took that already: ISO.

Even worse is the frickin United Nations. They use Real for both their live webcasts and radio streams (they have one token mp3 stream, but everything else is .ram)

A simple lookup of ISO 8601should be adequate to explain the logic. The majority of this planet's humans use it.

>Having C# and the CLI become an ISO 9000 standard would make it easy to teach, learn, develop and port.
It IS an ISO standard: ISO/IEC 23270:2003

Anonymous Coward wrote:
Yes, DNSSEC is unfinished. The IETF has become worse than ISO.

Nope, IETF won't be worse than the ISO as long as the IETF allows you to read the standard without charging you.

[...I'm thinking of getting myself a copy of one of the C++ specs to help me answer the really obscure questions. Does someone recommend a particular spec (e.g., ANSI, ISO)?]

And, it's not a puppet body like some other bodies you might be able to think of.

Dude, pass me that crack. ECMA and ISO have way more credibility than JCP. ISO is the standards organization.

Proprietary? When did we start talking about the JVM?

ISO/IEC CLI standard

But then you did call the CLI/.NET a "protocol" so I'm guessing you're not too overstocked in the clue department anyways...

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/faqs/faq-general.html#1. 10

1.10 Can anyone join ISO?

Not as individuals or as enterprises - although both have a range of opportunities for taking part in ISO's work, or in contributing to the development of standards through the ISO member in their country. Membership of ISO is open to national standards institutes or similar organizations most representative of standardization in their country (one member in each country). Full members each have one vote, whatever the size or strength of the economy of the country concerned. This means that they can all make their voices heard in the development of standards which are important to their country's industry. ISO also has two categories of membership for countries with fewer resources. Although such members do not have a vote, they can remain up to date on standardization developments. Lists of the three categories of ISO members are available on ISO Online.

Do you really thing MS would risk having the standard at the whim of the non-strategically-aligned?

You have to buy it from the ISO, AFAIK [though it's pretty cheap, 44 Swiss Francs]. Assuming that you're in America (which I have no reason to do whatsoever, but at least it's a start ;-) you can purchase it through The American National Standards Institute, you're looking for standard ISO 9899:1999, "Programming Languages -- C".

It's pretty much a necessity to have a reference copy of this if you intend to be writing any cross-platform C code. While Kernighan+Ritchie only deals with platform-agnostic C code, they don't always tell you where the mistakes that they are avoiding lie.

Since 1988, when the ISO (International Stanards Organization) published ISO 11172, apparantly revised in 1993. Either way, it's been an offical internation standard for a many years.

Even if mp3 were not a true ISO standard, which it certainly is, it's deployed widely enough to be considered a de-facto standard. But that's a moot point, because MPEG layer 3 audio is indeed an official international standard, ISO 11172-3, according to the International Standards Organization. An official ISO standard that's very widely deployed... it just doesn't get any more "standard" than that.

Sealand is not on the list (which can be viewed at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma /02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html).

ISO 3166 is the "authority" because that's what IANA decided (thus shifting the burden of recognizing nations to another standards-organization). See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld.htm (where you'll find a link to IANA's decision enabling the .ps ccTLD for the Palestinian Territory). See also http://www.caslon.com.au/domainsprofile.htm

Sealand is not on the list (which can be viewed at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma /02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html).

ISO 3166 is the "authority" because that's what IANA decided (thus shifting the burden of recognizing nations to another standards-organization). See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld.htm (where you'll find a link to IANA's decision enabling the .ps ccTLD for the Palestinian Territory). See also http://www.caslon.com.au/domainsprofile.htm

RFC 1591
The country codes are 2 letters. The codes come from IANA which refers to ISC country codes, so complain to ISO. Besides .sa and .se are taken. They could go to .oc (ocean), but who'd want that?

After some further reading, it seems that IANA's policy is to only issue TLDs for countries listed in the ISO 3166 country list, so a new TLD would not be allowed.

On the same page, you can also see some other applications for redelegation such as .JP, .CA, and .AU.

Unfortunately RFID systems have no standards yet. There is no ISO for the protocols these talk at all! There are, in fact, many competing systems from many manufacturers!

So, as such, even if the publisher (or manufacturer, if you're talking more than books) puts an RFID tag into the item, who's to say the bookseller, library, etc. will even be able to use the tag? There is no way to guarantee that the tag system that the publisher uses is the same system the store uses at all.Until there is some sort of standard, regulated way of using the RFID tags, you'll never see these being put in every item on the shelf. We all know how long standards take to be put in place for commercial applications.

That said, there are already papers at ISO on RFID... right here.

Yeah, I'll love it when Software Engineering is considered a "real Engineering discipline". Just like how much I want to to program to ISO 9000 compliance so I can be a "professional". Screw it, call me a duck and let me do my work.
Anyway, storing programming patterns are fine, but a repository of them is going to help me very little in my job. Hell, I haven't even gotten around to reading Design Patternsby Erich Gamma et al. Programming is art as much as it is engineering; it is akin to being both the architect and the engineer.

The International Organization for Standardization deals with standards. Try

ISO 5807:1985

Information processing -- Documentation symbols and conventions for data, program and system flowcharts, program network charts and system resources charts

Looks like it will cost you $60 though.