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Are Standards Groups Stifling Innovation?
cpfeifer writes "Jim Waldo expresses a a controversial viewpoint in his blog: "Common wisdom, especially in distributed computing, says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history, and is curtailing innovation and rewarding bad behavior in our industry. " He also goes on to clarify his position and explain his reasoning."
...is having so many to choose from.
Obviously, standards only emerge when a practice has been agreed upon. Further innovation leads to a development of a new standard.
We need standards so that stuff gets done, communicatio happens, etc. But I do understand the authors point. But I think that standards are a good thing if drafted well, and leave room for improvement.
Great Linux Site
Bill Thomson posted a rebuttal in his blog, and then (according to his blog) went pee, and played with foofie, his irish setter.
Who are these people. I hate slashdot editors.
says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history
*COUGH* decimal system *COUGH* metric system *COUGH COUGH* posix *COUGH* TCP/IP *COUGH RAAAHHH RAHHH*
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How many people want to rewire thier houses with a plug system that provides more features or capabilities, but with the added costs of all electronics you purchase at target need an adapter?
Or how about having to worry when you go into the gas station if the nozzle is compatable with your car?
Sure standards slow down innovation, but the costs that the standards provide can be worth it.
will slow down progress, yes. Because no matter how forward-thinking the people are who make the standards, there an infinite number of things that they can not anticipate.
But still, working within standards is necessary to bring past inventions and innovations to the masses.
Certainly, if you are working on some cutting edge project in the MIT AI labs, you don't need to worry too much about the RFCs. But ten years later when someone is trying to bring that product to the public, standards become tremendously important.
Lack of standards alowed the web to develop at an enormous rate, but then it was the introduction of standards that actually made it usable by the avergae person.
lysergically yours
We have standards for a reason.
Would you like to buy a cd only to find out that it will only work on X cdplayer? or a device that's only able to run if you're with Z electricity company?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I only know of two standards that have ever been of lasting use to me:
0
and
1
Everything else is probably just hype.
Yes standards can be a pain and they can stifle innovation. But there are trade offs. And that is chaos. As much as innovation is a noble goal it has to be traded off with standards.
For example take WiFi. Gee imagine we had ten different WiFi protocols. What would we get? The North American Cellular phone standards where everybody has their own freaken way of doing things.
Yes standards should solve a problem, but standards are required. Imagine everybody deciding by themselves which side of the road to drive on. Or deciding that some people want 40 volts another wants 90 volts, etc.
Why not use defacto standards? Because defacto standards might become out of date standards. This is not to say that they should not be investigated, but if there is a standard that works use it....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
without standards, innovation takes place in less discrete steps. it is not clear when "the next level" has been reached. perhaps in some cases standards stifle, but they really are necessary in my opinion (and the opinions of others, of course) if concerted progress is to be possible .
I think, if the standards get in the way of innovation, the would-be innovators buck the standard.
Remember the standardized user interface that was one of the early Mac OS's strengths over the other OS's out there? One of the big players back then, I think it was Adobe, "broke" Apple's GUI standards where the designers deemed it to be necessary; neither their product nor the Mac OS suffered as a result.
Standards are good where they are needed, but when they hold things back....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What is better a standard forced by law, or a standard forced the one holding the biggest piece of the pie. There is not way around standards, there has to be one way to interconnect and communicate with everything, like that IBM commercial there is no universal adapter, and the only way to reach this adapter is through standards.
Useless sig.
I don't need to ask "Where's Waldo?" ever again...he's at Sun!
Standard protocols may suck, but at least they suck in well-known and well-understood ways.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I SAID BE QUIET!
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
He's not saying that standards are bad, as much as he's saying that it may be better to take existing useful technology and then standardize it (think SSH and SSL, protocols that were standardized after initial deployment).
In the cases designed by committees, they ended up with something so complicated that nobody has ever implemented it fully (X.509*). In the cases that were implemented and later standardized, deployments with full features are widespread.
(*At first glance, the statements about X.509 seem contradicted by the fact that X.509 is used in SSL. The fact is that SSL stacks use about 1% of the features described in RFC 2459 (X.509v3). This is what I'm talking about: ridiculously overcomplicated committee designs)
Read http://java.sun.com/people/jag/StandardsPhases/ind ex.html
No agreed-upon standards, no consistent format, no market. That's why North America is just barely getting into HDTV now, when Japan and Germany have had it for a decade.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
People and companies do
If you design a website according to spec, you're going to have close to 95% (i.e. IE users) of web browsers incorrectly displaying the website. I HATE this. I am new to web development in general, I've barely got a year of programming behind me and I find it easiest when I can read exactly what I can/can't or should/shouldn't use. I've written pages that render perfectly under Gecko and KHTML but whatever pile of ass that MS is using makes it look horrible, and I must rework.
Ah, but we can choose! If it made a damn bit of difference to the people attached to those web browsers they might complain or outright switch. But the inconvenience or ignorance of switching drives people to stay where they are, comfortably annoying those of us who have a hard enough time learning stuff, let alone learning it correctly then incorrectly.
Oh this is such a pile of shit. Without standards, the person with the best marketing will become the standard... not the best and most useful system.
Sure standards do slow innovation... but so does the the FDA when they ask for proper testing and years of results before millions of people pop that blue pill. Proper testing and analysis of innovations in technology need to occur before we just plaster them across the network only to find out later how gimped it was to begin with.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Are Standards Groups Stifling Innovation?Is this a subtle /. "Microsoft is pushing innovation" commercial?
but they also allow people to work together. What if you had to learn a different TCP/IP stack everytime you changed jobs? Wouldn't be any fun now, would it? Even in the middle ages, people used standards. Stone masons had standard measuring units (don't remember what they were though. Any ideas?) that enabled them to travel across the country and find work. Sure, there will alway be differences, but minor ones. Besides, everything new starts out with not being a standard. Inventors work to create standards so that their product can be used by as many people as possible.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
And why do I care what he writes in his blog?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Where's Waldo?
All your base are belong to us!
RFC 3268 describes the way you should use the Advanced Encryption Standard with SSL/TLS.
My experiences weren't at all like the ones described in the article, even though we certainly weren't codifying existing practice. No one threatened to leave and join a rival standards effort, even though AES over TLS is important for government contracts. Most of the argument was about the minutiae of the protocol. For example there was a long discussion about the padding type and cipher mode of operation.
The problem I had was that the process is horribly slow. There are a few people in the IETF who have a lot of work to do, and you tend to find yourself sitting in a queue for a long time.
That said, I think it was a very worthwhile thing to do. If we hadn't done AES through the IETF, no one could have interoperated. It wouldn't be a case of then codifying existing practice a few years on because it simply wouldn't work. The different TLS implementations need to use the same ciphersuite numbers for example. Much better to sort that out on an IETF mailing list than try to cobble something together in a series of bilateral discussions.
Standards allow innovators to communicate their ideas effectively, and to build upon the established status quo. To paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, standards allow innovators to stand upon the shoulders of giants.
Here are a few of the standards that I'm using right now (and that you're using with me) that are letting us have this discussion:
The English language
QWERTY keyboard layout
PC architecture (made up of countless standards)
HTTP
ADSL and other connectivity technologies
That's not an exhaustive list, but it is one that clearly illustrates how standards help us every day. And if I'm designing a new PC bus (or a new HTTP-like protocol, broadband connection mechanism, foolproof method for making apple pie, etc), then I can draw on the design, user experiences, et al of the existing solutions to help me make my uber idea a reality.
Standards are our friend. Sure, sometimes new innovations don't build upon existing ones, but even knowing when to tear up the old rule book and write a new one requires knowledge of what was wrong with the old one.
I might not have ever invented anything of any major significance (yet) but I'm humble enough to realise that, if I ever do, it'll be because, like Newton, I've been fortunate to have the endeavours of others to either build upon or dismiss.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This guy is just thinking out loud, he's not saying anything of importance, or interest. All he's doing is saying what everyone knows, in an inflamatory manner to drive up his hits.
It's a -blog- people... there's nothing to see here, move along.
Point two: A standards body is often a lousy place in which to invent a technology
No it's not. Standards are there to get the basics out of the way and move forward. For example, you can focus on inventing a time machine without having to figure out if the screws on your machine will fit the holes in your DMC's dashboard, or calculating the power it'll need in gigowatts, instead of number of power-foos that no-one else uses but the power-supply manufacturer you need that precious device from.
Good standards are good. Period. Bad or hard-to-use standards tend to be replaced by better ones. And standards that once were great (like the imperial system) can also be replaced by even better ones (like the metric system). But at any rate, no standards means no communication and no progress. That's a historical fact. Even the language I use to post this reply is a standard.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We need standards. There are far too many existing computers and a market that sells too many computers, regardless of size, to allow for standards to lapse. We do also need technological advancement, but a practice that makes sense is to take an existing standard and make use of it while working newer technologies through revisions to where they are stable enough to make for a new standard. Repeat. This allows for something like RS232 to be king for a long time, but ultimately be replaced by something like Ethernet. Ultimately, something will replace that, no matter how much speed we manage to get over it. Serial didn't start at 115200, it started in the range where someone with good hearing could interpret what a modem was doing. At this oint, except for special applications, serial is dead. Most of our modems aren't even serial anymore, and we certainly don't use it for peripherals. USB replaced that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There are no standards for standards. Because of this, there's no recursion - when something new is required, it can break from standards, but it must be worthwhile enough to stand on it's own merits - and possibly create a new standard.
Blindly following standards doesn't stifle creativity. The people who are creative recognize standards for what they are, and either conform or don't. If they choose not to conform, they take a risk.
One standard doesn't fit all.
MP3 is not THE standard. It is one of many standards. It may be the most widely used right now but that's because of applications like Napster which propelled it into the limelight overnight. It's all about creativity and how you work with the standards. For instance I know of many amazing web sites which follow web standards to the letter. And what's surprising is that they have used CREATIVITY to develop and mimic sites that use "non-standard" eye candy without ever breaking the rules of standard'ism.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
Wasn't this the approach that Microsoft has used? Do we really want a world full of Microsoft non-standard code? Oh wait, we already have that.
So that's why we have the need for standards!
Common wisdom [..] says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history, and is curtailing innovation and rewarding bad behavior in our industry.
So true. The world would be a much better place without standards...
Man: Hello shopkeeper, I'd like to buy some cheese please.
Shopkeeper: Fine sir. How much do you want?
Man: 500 grams.
Shopkeeper: Sorry sir. We don't use grams here. We use flogborts.
Man: What's a flogbort?
Shopkeeper: It's our own system. Much better than grams. I'll explain..
Man: Don't bother. How many grams to a flogbort?
Shopkeeper: A6NG8
Man: What?
Shopkeeper: Sorry sir, we don't use decimal either. We have our own system. I have a diagram somewhere...
Man: Listen, just give me one dollars worth.
Shopkeeper: A dollars worth? I'm afraid we don't accept dollars...
etc. etc.
A prime example of a technology that has great benefits, but now that it's defined as a 'standard' is being pushed for use into areas where non XML formats would be far simpler, more efficient and equally easy to understand.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Standards are important. Standards make moving from one system to another easier. Standards make understanding a system easier because the general traits relay over.
That is why there are standards. What is the point of innovation to a system which is accepted, and enjoyed?
You could add innovation to coffee pots. Numerous different brands of coffee pots all with gadjets that you must study before using.
Well I just want coffee. I don't care if you can make my coffee in a variety of new an innovative ways. I want to hit a button, walk away, and in a various ammount of time afterwards have coffee.
I want to view a webpage. I want content. I don't want new and innovative ways to view the content, Just give me the webpage.
Once something works, and works well, I could care less about innovation as it concerns changing what works.
If it ain't broke.
http://use.perl.org
First, a few examples... without ISA and PCI, we wouldn't have any hardware devices that we could just plug in to our computers. Without DirectX, OpenGL, and SDL, we wouldn't have games that could run on multiple platforms. Without TCP, I wouldn't be able to post on slashdot.
Standards are extremely important to computing, but not in the way decried in the article. Standards are not cool for their own sake, they're powerful because they enable modularity and layering, the true holy grails of effective computing. The designer of your network card didn't have to think about what the CPU in your machine was doing, or even whether there's a CPU at all! As long as it handled the specified PCI signals, it will operate correctly in a "standard" PCI system. Likewise, the game developers can use the same OpenGL calls to communicate with many different video cards, because the drivers fulfill the requirements of the standard.
Standards help to erect useful barriers between logical layers of software and hardware. Like anything, they can be misapplied, and using standards "just because they're standards" can often lead to trouble. Still, well-done standards are and will be the foundation just about any successful computing architecture.
Wireless networking had been out for years before 802.11b. To this day, 802.11a and 802.11g are out, but most people are still using B. Why? It works, it works well, and everybody has it.
Working in networking, my job would be 3 times worse if everyone didn't order the wires in a standard way. Can you picture if every network vendor had a different jack? If you want a confusing an annoying time, try buying a circuit breaker. Every manufacturer uses a different style. Some have 2 or 3 styles.
Standards are the building blocks that allow us to have a predicable environment on which true innovation is based. Innovation is not about re-inventing the wheel. It's about slapping and engine on 4 of them, and driving with it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Everyone knows Z Electric is the best company to go with. I mean you get $100 off your bill every month if subscribe to MSN Internet for the beginner's 10 Year Plan. (Sort of like the whole Best Buy deal you can get) Oh and Microsoft swears it's the best internet you can get next to 1st Generation Text-Based Prodigy.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
I also write standards complient XHTML, and IE almost always displays it correctly. There are a few minor hicups (CSS Borders to name one), but nothing that can't be easily overcome if you know what you are working with. The fact is however that you can write standard compliant code that will render properly under IE, Gecko, Opera, whatever.
Six Sigma
"...has no basis in fact or history, and is curtailing innovation and rewarding bad behavior in our industry." not.
...that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard.
Any blanker statement should trigger bells and warning lights. There is no right approach to all problems. Nowhere does it say that the right approach will always be a standard. In any case, it is my firm belief that reliance on proprietary software, especially non-interoperable interfaces and protocols, has hindered the development of technology.
I'll give some credit to the article though. Email, for one, is arguably hindered by strict conformance to the standard. But then, if there were no standard, there would only be isolated communities, or perhaps isolated communities passing mail through designated gateways (remember the problems communication from Genie, Compuserve, Bix, etc?).
But the stronger argument is the Internet itself. TCP/IP, though not perfect, has enabled millions of devices from a myriad array of manufacturers to interoperate. A person is not tied to one protocol or manufacturer and is largely able to choose equipment based on performance and value. Contrast this with the nightmarish, pre-tcp/ip days when you needed dedicated gateways and translation boxes to create heterogenous networks.
Standards are great, but they have to be implemented to be useful. Implemented standards can make or break a project. You can take all of these commodity protocols, data formats, etc.. and use them without royalty in your project to make it a success. This saves a lot of reinventing the wheel with less thought-out designs and implementations.
Where is Waldo, anyway?
.... use interfaces instead. Tie up your systems with a tool like Vitria, SeeBeyond, Microsoft BizTalk, pay some $600k+ on licensing fees and configuration and make some systems integrators happier!
"Good standards can provide interoperability and portability. Bad standards can stifle innovation. "supports XXX standard" is not a real user requirement, particulary if XXX was designed by a committee of "experts" who, throughout the entire process, never once ate their own dogfood. The best software is developed by trial, error and experimentation. De facto standards are usually a much better fit to user requirements than a priori ones."
The standard Hibernate deviates from is JDO (Java Data Objects) and the claim here is that it is successful partly because it has departed from the standard which is more complex and difficult to use.
When I posted my last entry, I realized that I might be stirring up a hornet's nest. Indeed, I could hear the buzzing just before I pressed the submit button, and almost decided against it. Such good sense has never been my hallmark in the past, however, nor did it overcome my hope that I wouldn't regret the posting. While I don't regret it, it has been instructive to listen to the replies. Some have been well-thought out, others not so much. But the replies did make me realize that I had posted in haste in one respect, since the main points I was trying to make have not seemed to have come through clearly.
So I'll try again. I'm hoping that the second time will be the charm. Either I will make my points more clearly, or I'll realize that they can't be made. So here goes...
Point one: Just because something is called a standard doesn't make it open; and something that isn't a standard is not, because of that, proprietary. The standard/non-standard and open/proprietary dimensions are orthogonal. Certainly, there are lots of technologies that are standards and are also open, but there is no causal connection between the two properties. Just look at the controversy in a number of standards groups right now as to the granting of intellectual property when contributing to a standard. If being a standard made something open, there would be no such controversy. In the same way, there are things that aren't standards that are quite open...look at most of the open or community software that hasn't been formally standardized. The source code is free for the taking; the reuse of that code is determined by more or less restrictive licenses. There are plenty that are very open, even though they are not standard.
The real point here is that whether something is open or proprietary depends on things like the licensing model, the intellectual property grants, and other sorts of legal notions around the technology. Whether or not something is a standard depends on acceptance by some standards group. Barring some connection between the two (which, by the way, a number of standards groups are trying to construct), there is no connection between the two. A simple point, but one that often gets lost.
Point two: A standards body is often a lousy place in which to invent a technology. This is the essence of what I was trying to get at by distinguishing between de facto and de jure standards. Technology, I would claim, is best invented or designed by one person or a small group of people, working together for a common goal that all of them understand and agree to. While there can be a standards group that meets this description, it is rarely the case that standards groups do. More generally, such groups are made up of a rather large group, each member of which is pushing for the good of his or her own company or interest group. Such a group can actually be a good thing if you are trying to determine which of a group of existing technologies will get the widest adoption, but they tend to be bad at creating a coherent, efficient, and elegant design from whole cloth.
This doesn't mean that such a group can't ever produce a good technology. There is no logical impossibility that is meant to be implied here. And while I would be surprised, I could be convinced that a good technology had actually been created by such a diverse group. But I don't personally know of any examples.
Notice, by the way, that there can be a small group of people with a common goal who work together towards an understood and agreed to end that calls itself a standards group. Many of the IETF's early working groups were just such organizations. But once a standard is seen as commercially important, it is much less likely that the standards group will be made up of such technologists. Again, this is a personal observation, not a logical truth.
Point three: The previo
He isn't to be taken lightly. Jim developed the first ORB, was the lead architect of Jini and he had prominent role in RMI. However, the most interesting thing about him is that he holds masters in linguistics and philosophy (in addition to his PhD in distributed computing).
I attended a session of his on Jini at the WTC. Hmmm....
I don't mean to be snarky, but can somebody tell me what the word "standard" means in this discussion, plus tell me what is or isn't a standards body?
For example, is XML a standard? Java? CORBA?
Is the W3C a standards body? The JCP folks? ECMA?
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems and a big time java man. Sun never put java to an official standards body, unlike M$ who recently put c#, .NET and the CLR through ECMA and pending ISO. so here are Sum trying to justify the sluggish JCP (Just crap patches) the article even has a javaOne banner ad. This is just even more PR spin.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
But standardization does in fact benefit innovation in the form of group innovation. Standardizing allows the public to build off the new technology. This allows incremental improvement as well as opens up the new technology for public critique, which can in turn lead to standards improvement or possibly abandonment (for something newer/better).
I've seen enough posts bringing up things like energy (electric, gas, etc) or transportation standards and how essential they are. Very true, but keep in mind that a maturation process was necessary before a standard could be created. It was crucial for respective innovators to work in somewhat of a vacuum before the overall innovation reached a threshold where a standard (for the benefit of the public) could be a created.
Lets say I wanted to write a client to transfer files via the internet. I could just write my own from scratch, looking at low-level socket communication. Oh! Wait a minute, I ran into a standard, the TCP/IP stack. Nah, I'll use UDP. D'oh! Ran into another standard.
Now, let's say that I've written my FTP-like transfer system using low-level sockets, but I don't follow the FTP standard. Does this mean that I've limited my creativity? Absolutely not. I've done this, and to be honest with you, there are a lot of ways to speed up FTP. So while I'm not using the FTP "standard", I am using it as a basis for my own innovative way to transfer data, at a rate that can be 2-3x faster, depending on the network.
Stiffling innovation indeed...
I head your email...
Who is John Galt?
An excellent example is the mars probe that was (more or less) recently lost due to a problem with units. Or back in the day, when no one could decide on the compression standards for 14.4 modems.
The problem isn't with adopting a standard, the problem is getting mired in a zillion groups formed to decide exactly what that standard is. Since many companies and all governments are monolithic in nature, it takes forever for them to decide what the standards are, and invariably they go to the highest bidder.
Standards can slow progress down, but unless you have standards, you will never scale and sustain.
This isn't exactly a new view. James Gosling's classic Phase Relationships in the Standardization Process is already 13 years old.
-Tom Duff
A: Researchers.
Seriously, if you're trying to innovate, just go out and do it. Nobody's stopping you. Standards groups are around to prevent total havoc from reigning when you foist your innovation on the unsuspecting public. If your "innovation" requires having thousands of users to really get anywhere, then maybe you'd better publish a paper. Either that or sell it in a black box so your bugs won't perpetuate in later products. If you can't make it to market and you can't make it in the academic circles, then whatever stifling effect the standards group has had is for the public good. I like tinkering with my machines and occasionally watch them break in novel ways, but there are an enormous number of people whose livelihoods and safety depend on reliable operation of these systems, and the standards groups help protect them.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
...this person never had to get a printer working with Wordperfect 4.2 in DOS 3.3 and then print from Lotus 1-2-3 to the same said printer.
Standards are a good thing for common access points. Should there be a standard bad guy in every video game with the same face? no. Should there be a standard way to draw said bad guy on your screen so youc an shoot him? yes.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
What the article talks about is a difference between two kinds of standards. Those that codify existing practice (SMTP, IP, ANSI C, HTTP 0.9, most of the early Internet standards I think) and those which attempt to create a new standard from scratch. He doesn't like the second kind.
I think it's similar to the argument that says you shouldn't set a program's design in stone before it is implemented, because until you have a working implementation you can't know what the best design would be (nor indeed what the requirements will become). And I have a lot of sympathy with that.
But while a few years of anarchy followed by a period of standardization can work well in some cases, you can't seriously suggest that in areas where there are big upfront costs to get into the market it is better to let people waste effort thrashing around with a dozen different formats or protocols until one of them wins 'in the marketplace'. (And we all know that 'the marketplace' is often lousy at picking the best technical solution, worse even than standards committees.) Mobile phones are a great example. You need to have an agreed standard before you start manufacturing, not afterwards.
If new standard creation is politically motivated by companies who have a potential new product to promote, so what? That's surely preferable to having no standard at all, launching several new products with incompatible formats or protocols, and then years later trying to document and standardize whichever random one of them seems to be the winner. Case in point: where is the standards document and process for MS Word file format?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's not an issue, because something clearly better will emerge due to necesity and break the standard. Always has. Always will.
Deja Moo: The feeling you have heard this bull before
I may be in the minority here, but I do believe that if you design a software project with a specific standard in mind, there had better be a compelling reason for that decision. The only one I can think of offhand is interoperability with other software or hardware. Where the problem lies is software or hardware that doesn't publish its storage or communication formats. Those formats become a defacto standard for others to inter-operate with your software or hardware. I am sure anyone who has tried to write to a standard has required only a portion of that standard, and would have liked other features in order to increase speed, or decrease size, or cut down on code-bloat. I do not have the resources to start a standards body, but if I write a program or have a product that gains noticable market-share, my "standard" will at least be looked at by that body. If you are lucky enough to have the lion-share of the market, you HAVE the standard, and everyone will support your format or protocol. So yes, as a market stabilizes, so do the standards, and as more people agree on them other protocols are left behind.
Standards evolve! help them along.
<backPedallingContradiction>
Err... Except you Microsoft, this IS Slashdot after all, and your embrace and extend techniques.... ummm yeah... don't do that... at least not without publishing them, and preferrably before you release a product that uses it.
</backPedallingContradiction>
-bhs
A good real-world case study of premature standardization is W3C XForms. I had a discussion back in April with the XFroms community and spec leads on the www-forms@w3.org mailing list that you might wonna check out.
See the threads entitled "Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms" and "The Devil of Good is Perfect", for example.
Another good real-world case study using the "build it first and standarize later" approach is XUL (XML UI Language). Innovation using XML to build UIs is flourishing and slowy a XUL community is emerging. For getting started with XUL check out the XUL Alliance Link-opida and see a replay of the original HTML story in the upcoming XUL browser wars and standardization drive and more.
Hey, that guy has my name as his last name. Weird.
-Waldo Jaquith
The whole of maths is just one big standard. Thing where we'd be today if it wasn't, bastards.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I think the basic premise that we should use standards is sound... we just have to be careful what we allow to become standard.
his last point from part 2:
.doc. But, more often than not, the exact opposite happens. 56k modem sales stagnated for a *eay* when they were introduced with two standards--x2 and k56flex. Only the richest (relatively speaking) early adopters bought them for the longest time because there was no way to know if you'd be able to use it in the future. Different ISPs supported different standards at different times, and who knew what woudl happen if your ISP changed preferred technologies, or went under, or got bought, or if you switched ISPs yourself for whatever reason? Most people knew that there would eventually be just one standard in the future and had know way to know if that new standard would be backwards-compatible with x2, k56, neither, or both. Then, along came v.90 and everything was great.
Point four: If there are multiple groups competing to write a standard for the same thing, it is probably a safe bet that the technology being standardized isn't ready for standardization. This is the point I was really trying to make, but didn't state explicitly. But this is the one that I think is important for all of us who are trying to produce and use technology to understand.
One point he misses--as often than not, its due to greed. Companies want to have *the* standard and as close to 100% as possible of the revenue from that product's market. Look how far MS has gotten with
The best quote I've ever seen on the subject comes from openh323.org's home page: "The aim is to 'commodotisetheprotocol'. By giving the stack away, maybe we can stop everyone obsessing over how to format the bits on the wire, and get them writing applications instead."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Microsoft doesn't have this problem because they don't follow standards.
Can you imagine projects of this complexity being accomplished without standards? They have standard wood sizes, standard door sizes (carpentry is riddled with standard sizes for common things, but I'm not a carpenter, so I don't know the details), standard screw & bolt sizes. Then theres the plumbling, the electricty...
All of these details need to fit together in a predictable way and these specialized groups need to communicate in order to minimize conflicts. The lumber yard doesn't have time to cut new sizes of wood for each customer and the door manufacturer can't create special-make a door for each new house.
I don't think anyone can dispute that the software industry is in a similar position-- Teams of software engineers working together on projects, the OS needs to communicate with the software, blah blah blah. Of course we need standards! Some are more necessary than others, but how will we know in a year which web standards will be essential and which won't? Its good that we're drafting standards now so we have something to work with in the future. Maybe some standards will get thrown out, maybe some won't. This might stifle some innovation, but can you really argue its necessity?
Yeah, just think of all the progress in physics that could have happened long ago if it weren't for the standard kilogram, meter, second...
But seriously
They probably mean the term 'innovation' in the Msft sense of the word: "something used to confuse and frighten customers into buying your version of a product that someone else already makes".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
from the lets-tar-and-feather-this-idiot dept.
I mean come on is this guy for real?
He is just trying to get picked up for presentations by all the vendors that are still trying to get customers to buy prioriatary technology....
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
Innovation is exploration, discovering the best solution to specific problems through the various techniques we use: scattershot, imagination, design, etc. This is largely an individual enterprise - innovation by committee is a joke.
Standardization happens later on the curve when the best innovations have been tested in real life (though with a limited audience). Then, a skilled committe will merge several innovations into a standard, and define a basis for dividing-up large problems.
Standards are interfaces between groups working on different aspects of a problem. Innovation allows one to understand what these aspects might be, and later to repeat the same process on smaller problems.
Using the "divide and rule" metaphor, standards are the "divide" and innovation is the "rule". Only it's rule and divide and rule and divide and rule ad infinitum. You really should not try to divide and rule at the same time.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Shopkeeper: A dollars worth? I'm afraid we don't accept dollars...
Man [Angry]: Dammit! Just give me 4N flogborts of cheese then!
Shopkeeper: Ah. We'll have to order it if you want that much Sir. We could have it for you by Four Uppity One on Snorbsday. Is that ok?
Man slams door leaving cheese shop
Shopkeeper [calling after him]: Whippitydee to you Sir! [Under his breath] Snobblefocker.
int main(void) -
Yeah, standards are pointless. Sheesh.
Bowie J. Poag
Enohvasun es thee mohst enpoortant theng!
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
Anyone got a mirror?
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
than which "standard" you choose, is that even if you make up something new or arbitrary, that it is open. What really stifles innovation is when someone makes up something new and doesn't tell anyone else. Too often the best ways of doing things are patented and proprietary. File systems are a good example.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Sure, there were lots of designs for gears early on. If we had standardized early, we might have ended up wasting time on substandard gears because the standard was immature. A bit of competition between possible standards is a good thing during the early adoption phase.
Stop the brainwash
The idea behind standards are that you can take at least one portion of your infrastructure as given and innovate on top of it.
:-D)
Examples:
Standard: HTTP and HTML
Innovation: Web Portals
While the progress of HTTP and HTML MAY have been quicker if they weren't tied to a "slow moving/stodgy" standards group this would have meant that things like Web Portals would have been hampered by trying to figure out what transport technology and client technology to embrace. (Heck you probably wouldn't have had a portal in the first place, just more BBS's.
Standard: US Electricity 110 V.
Innovation: Lava lamp. (Yeah, arguable.)
A bit absurd, but the idea here is that you can innovate on the actual lamp rather than worrying about the incoming current and plug shape, etc. A better example may be those replacement flourescent bulbs that you can get now.
So, yeah standards do in fact inhibit innovation in certain areas. The thing is, that innovation does have to be slowed down. You need to have some sort of foundation in which to build the REALLY innovative stuff on top of.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
oooh, So *thats* what Microsoft means when they're "Innovators" by ignoring the W3...
I never knew.
Computational Madness in a round package.
hmm...looks like he shoulda hosted these articles on BitTorrent
And how would /. posters feel if Samuel Johnson hadn't begun the first dictionary? Pretty happy, I'd suppose.
IEEE, IETF, IANA... These standards groups have been around a long time & have earned major credibility for making crucial decisions at the right time. That's really what it's all about when developing & setting standards and henceforth establishing standards groups, no? The subsequent credibility of a standards group follows the standards the group signs off on. If it had been a proprietary group like Wintel instead of J. Postel back in the early 80s we wouldn't have gotten TCP/IP and the RFC system when we did. Therefore I think standards groups for the standards groups are needed, now more than ever. It's like oversight for oversight. We don't have a lack of standards. Far from it, we have a lack of central, accountable organization bodies made up of counselors or commissioners who transparently decide on standards. With time it is this transparency that will earn respect in the international online standards community, not bags of cash and not closed-door meetings seeking out the highest bidder we've been thru that before it doesn't work for the majority commons.
shame there isn't a standard for handling a right good slashdotting. I'll wait until tomorrow to read his article, then.
Language, writing, spelling, currency, the layout of your car, the dimensions of the equipment in the kitchen, building material, hardware ( nuts, bolts, etc). Every time man gets into doing somthing new, standards are developed. Even neolythic culturs had standards that their tools were based on. We all saw on Mars, what happened when standards were violated, i.e. ssszzzZZZZBANG.
What good are "standards" when everyone makes one? For the best words on the subject, check out Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "Superiority" in _The_Expedition_to_Earth_. Once it was required reading at MIT's school of engineering. If the Constition was not used as toilet paper by the Sonny Bozos of the world, it would be in the public domain today.
I returned to Canada after spending 5-1/2 years in the U.S. Naturally, I am comfortable with both metric and English measurement systems, but...
Recently, I went into a shop, got a bunch of stuff and went z. Diet Coke I told the shopkeeper, "I forgot my Coke. Charge me and I'll grab it on the way out." As the shopkeeper knew me, this wasn't odd. But, he had no idea what a 20oz Coke was -- and I didn't realize that it was my use of ounces that was confusing him.
In Canada, soft drinks generally come in 2 litre, one litre, 750 milliliter (well, when the bottles were glass, they used to), bottles; smaller plastic bottles, and cans. The cans are nominally 355 ml (10 oz.) and the small plastic bottles 591 or 600 ml. (20 oz.). Now, no one asks for a 355 ml. soft drink -- they ask for "a can of XXX", the "can" being an implied unit of soft drink volume measurement.
As my only experience with 20 oz soft drink bottles was in the U.S., I didn't think in terms of a 591 (nominally 600) ml. bottle, but rather a 20 oz. bottle -- I figured that the shopkeeper would respond, "Oh, you mean a 600 ml. bottle", and I'd reply, "Duh! I'm back in Canada... yeah, that sounds right." But, instead, he was utterly confused and not indicating that his confusion stemmed from my use of an unfamiliar volume measurement (which would have clued me in).
Now the funny thing is I can still get a proper 20oz pint of beer at the pub! -- none of this 500 ml. shit. As someone with a scientific bent, I appreciate the metric (base-10) system, and usually convert easily, but damn it: beer is meant to be dispensed in pints, yards, and barrels! Booze, of course, is sold in "fifths".
You could've hired me.
> Point four: If there are multiple groups competing to write a standard for the same thing, it is probably a safe bet that the technology being standardized isn't ready for standardization. This is the point I was really trying to make
This is the crux of it really. Seems to me he is saying 'Where possible, let standards take care of themselves. Let the market decide.'
Pretty insightful if you ask me. 3 different committees arguing over a standard for something that exists in beta/draft forms only is counter-productive. Instead, build all the versions, and let the market decide.
Examples of the market deciding a standard: VHS vs. Beta, IP vs. IPX, Photoshop vs. Everything Else, Horsepower. Ethernet vs. Token Ring, etc., etc.
Beta was supposedly better, but it didn't end up mattering (if it had mattered the market would've chosen Beta). Horsepower is a "bad standard" if you ask any literate engineer, but it's a good standard in that the market likes it, everybody's mom 'gets' it. The market forced Novell to adopt IP, because IPX sucks. The market usually makes good decisions.
Imagine if a committee got together back in the 80's to decide on LAN standards and because everybody was using NetWare, and 2 committee members were Novell employees, and 2 were from IBM, they decided on IPX ("Heck IPX is a great way to keep our LAN secure from that internet thing") and Token Ring. [shudders and turns pale].
I'll take the market's decisions over a committee's 95 times out of 100.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Standards may be revised, improved, or replaced. VHS is being replaced by DVD's... same general purpose, different standard. Yes, as far as recordable DVD's this is still sometimes a messy arena, wouldn't you prefer to just have it work without format wars.
And yes again, sometimes an old standard holds back a new innovation. It's a conflict between whether the current "stable" standard is worth changing in order to incorporate new features. If a new feature is good enough to incorporate, or enough new features/characteristics are added... the standard can change. Think of HTML, or just webpages in general (XML, etc), there are many versions of HTML, ja?
Newer browser support what is a new standard, or new additions on top of an older standard.
It's not a fixed thing... it can be improved. Innovation is only stifled if you let it be.
Basis State I state committee pos group mod one obj, temp found priepri mod object state temp oriented prie nunc obj language standard, temp declare nunc this state temp mod scientific obj standard fut sole.
... ... ... ...
Int Please req temp state aware be nunc clause state this temp equiv nunc mod intellectual obj property, and state state temp use nunc act sole mod state standard reflex act mod without state mod proper obj sole state temp payment nunc act of royalties act temp state prosecuted act fut by mad-dog lawyers for Microsoft such as the one who state temp state prosecute act prie hyp them group obj. English
2.
3. Profit!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Take a look at the select(2) system call. It seems to serve a useful purpose: it allows a single program thread to wait for activity on multiple network connections at once.
Back when select() was created, a process could only have 32 connections open at a time, maximum. So, the guy who invented the call decided that the caller could use 32-bit integers to represent lists of connections. You just set the bits corresponding to the connection numbers you want to watch and leave the other bits as zero. Then, the system alters the list in-place before it returns to indicate which connections are active.
Well, now adays, a program can have a few more than 32 connections open. However, for standards' sake, select() still uses bit fields. In Linux, these bit fields are something like 8k in size. Since they are altered in place when you call select(), you have to set them up fresh every time you call it. Then, the OS has to scan through them all and set up each connection for waiting. This is *slow*.
Much better methods of waiting on multiple connections have been developed. The best methods involve an event queue. You then tell each connection you want to watch to always place an event on the queue when it receives data. This way, the OS doesn't have to set up every connection all over again every single time you wait for activity. FreeBSD has an interface for this called "kernel queues" which is quite nice. Windows has all sorts of convoluted interfaces for it. Linux only just recently came up with a semi-decent interface called "epoll", but it is rather limited in some ways. In any case, all of these interfaces are different.
Unfortunately, select() has stuck because it is a standard. People use it because it works everywhere. It works everywhere because people use it. However, it is, IMO, one of the worst system calls I've ever soon.
This is why my basic opinion on standards is, "Standards are great as long as they don't suck!"
Actually, sadly, we are heading in this direction. Currently the standards are CD Audio and DVD for Video. However, new higher-density discs (DVD's and future blue-laser systems) as well as newer video codecs (think DivX) and audio codecs (MP3/Ogg) and high-definition audio streams (5.1 channel/DTS/Dolby) are about to seriously cause this "my disc doesn't fit in you player" thing again.
There are multiple standards for audio on a DVD disc. And then there is SACD (Super Audio CD) which is compatible with CD players, but now always).
And never mind DVD+-RW/RAM and God know what else. The DVD FAQ has a large compatibility matrix. Check it out and be scared.
With the the advent of blue lasers storage capacities of 25 Gigs per disc now become possible. And there a several competing disc formats to take advantage of this. To quote the DVD FAQ: "There are now at least 5 candidates for high-definition DVD:" (section 6.5).
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
Except now for physical disc formats there is also the issue of the logical encoding of media streams on the disc. I cannot remember how many times windows's media player could not find the codec.
OK, fiar enough, there is load of research into videocompression going on right now (even in image compression, witness JPEG2000 which uses wavelets).
Things are going to be worse before they get better for the next 10 years or so.
Interestingly, a friend of my dad has a large collection of old (as in pre-WWII) record and wax cylinder players. Many of those things were not compatible with each other either. Standards wars raged for many years.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Uh, I kinda' think that the HDTV thing is just a price issue. If a ton of people were buying HDTV sets, a de-facto standard would happen.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." -- Terry Pratchett
Standards allow free men to pull in all kinds of directions without running into each other.
I feel your pain man... for years I fought this very thing, before I more or less fled from the client side work and went to server programming.
My approach was to code 2 years behind the 'state o the art'. Even non-standard features tend to be more supported by then.
Unfortunately, with CSS and DHTML (especially if you code for 4.0+ browsers), you're pretty much SOL.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
That's the nature of the beast. Innovation comes from the little people with grand ideas. "Hey...I have a BETTER idea how to network, or how to have an interface with a computer..." and so on. Come up with a crazy idea and hopefully your idea is good enough to have standards be based around your idea (ie, 802.11(whatever letter you choose), FireWire, USB, etc). If you design based on current standards, you're screwed. We would be nowhere in society if we continued to design around standards.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Standards are what allows software to interoperate, even if you don't write them down. Without them, there'd be no internet (TCP, HTTP, HTML). The enemy is entrenched software (if you want to call that an enemy). No matter how many standards exist, or potential revisions to standards exist, people don't want to upgade their software, and whatever is most widely supported becomes THE standard.
Never use a standard you didn't create.
Change your standard every upgrade.
Force users to upgrade as often as possible.
Crush the competition.
Pay employees with stocks that have no real value, and don't record it as wages, pay no federal taxes.
Give away free OS's to poor countries that can only run other MS applications, but that applications are not free...
Buy the president and DOJ, bribe the judge that said "Linux is not competition for MS", bomb Iraq, nab the oil, release windows to the Russians (make it look like it's pirated) scream "piracy!" at the Russians, release worms to scare the world into a new upgrade cycle, release articles on how stupid standards are.
Like it or not, IE is current the de facto standard for web page compatibility. When you realize that 95% of the the people viewing your site are seeing it "incorrectly" I think it's time to re-evaluate what "correct" means in this context.
Gecko and KHTML all have their own quirks and bugs, and if they were as widely used as IE we'd see web designers railing against them just as loudly (minus that percentage that only complains when they can blame Microsoft.)
Since his 'blog' is only accesible due to standards, it must not contain anything innovative.
This is very similar to the US International keyboard, in Windows. Also ' is a acute accent, ~ is used to make ñ, " is umlaut, ^ makes â, ê, etc. and ` is grave accent.
My brother had free email access, but attachments were not allowed. He wanted some of his programs emailed to him.
What I did was first write a *very* short program similar to UUENCODE that broke the program into ascii, and another that reassembled it. I did it all in assembler using DOS Debug, so the decoding program was quite short: something like 90 bytes.
I then output it, data wise (d 100-28C) to a stream, collected it, edited the stream to a series of data entry commands (e 80 42 4C 81...),
and posted it on the email. Told him "Clip this, save as myfile.inp, also as decode.com, and then type C>debug decode.com myfile.inp". He did, and he had a reception program. That worked for about 3 files, but on the fourth it choked. Turned out that =20= was a special symbol that didn't transmit. I reprogrammed around it, sent that, and after that we had a nice little way to send and recieve programs via email.
No standards, except for the knowledge that he'd have a version of DOS Debug on his computer, too.
All of which totally misses your point, I know. But it was an interesting exercise.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
After way too many years dealing with standards, I've learned a couple of things - your milage may, as always, vary... There's no reason why standards must stifle innovation, but they often do. The most common causes I've seen have been: committees of more than three (plus/minus two) are bad places to try to innovate, agendas & innovation often don't mix well, & the number one reason is that all too often, standards are proposed without thinking through the actual implementation. The most effective standards I've seen have been the work of a very small group that shared a technical vision but didn't have a political agenda & that had already implemented something based on their proposal... Perhaps standards are not the best vehicle for innovation...
entropy requires no maintenance
I do not like it, and here's why:
If there were a place to go where I could see exactly how IE works, why it renders this like that, why CSS doesn't work and a quick efficient way around it, etc., then I would be more satisfied than I am now. I can go to the W3 and find out exactly how all this shit works together, and for the few discrepancies that do exist, I can look at Mozilla's site to find them. I'm not saying that I've done it more than once but when Mozilla has a problem I'll bet you my paycheck I can fix it. The only way around IE is to load up Dreamweaver and WYSIWYG my way out of the problem, and I see that as a horrible solution. It's another prime example of deviant application!
Do you notice how many font tags and needless stuff is in the output of a WYSIWYG editor? I can write a set of attributes once in a stylesheet for <p> for example, or even a class, and it will appear the same way every single time. Or, alternatively, I could have the editor use the deprecated <font> tag every single time I encounter a <p>. That makes no sense, and there have been documented, widespead advancements that continue to go un-freaking-noticed by companies because it would most likely require some work.
This brings me back to my original point in my first post which you ignored, people and companies who are lazy are the ones who stifle innovation. It wasn't meant to be a M$ bashing post, although sometimes I think the anti-MS-bashers are worse than the MS bashers themselves. If there is an organization that stifles innovation and the people do not work around the companies shortcomings, then yes, development and advancement of technology will crawl.
>minutiae of the protocol. For example there was a long discussion about the padding type and cipher mode of operation
Those are core crypto security issues.
OK, I can see calling them "minutiae" in the context of designing the overall protocol, but they're still critical.
Standards are good for interoperating with someone you don't know. When you are making the system others will hook into or the thing that hooks into someone's system. USB, PCI, TCP/IP(and subordinate RFC protocols) all facilitate talking to someone you've never worked with, and with a little luck it will all Just Work.
When you are working internally, or with a small group who is all in on the project, there's no need to bother unless you plan on opening up later. Standards are necessarily generic but there is optimization that can be gained from a specific solution. And after a little success, your specific solution could even become a standard.
Start Running Better Polls
Maybe correctly or incorrectly was the wrong choice of words. He just meant "documented" and "other."
A little better, though it is an O(n) data structure.
"Correct" means according to the spec, period. The spec was in place well before Microsoft ever came along and perverted it. The spec exists for the benefit of everyone and to promote competition. Naturally, since these two things are the antithesis of Microsoft's business philosophy, they won't follow the spec.
The fact that the ability to render a website correctly has become a competing point for web browsers is a testament to how bad things have gotten, and Microsoft is largely responsible. Are TV's judged on whether or not they can correctly decode a NTSC or PAL signal? NO! Web browsers are the only products I can think of that are judged on this basis. For the most part, ATi and nVidia cards render scenes correctly. Imagine a world where one of the cards is unable to render 50% of games incorrectly because the other card dominates the market with proprietary rendering schemes. The consumer loses because there is no more choice. Other products are judged on features and reliability, which are the same criteria any other product should be judged on. The only reason compatibility is a problem is because Microsoft is making it one so it can sell its products on that basis. Making compatibility a selling point opens the door for a total piece of shit, like Internet Explorer or Office, to become popular and monopolize the market. That is why we have standards: to prevent the kind of bullying Microsoft does to force people to use their products.
Ah yes, there are no legitimate complaints against Internet Explorer. Web designers trying to design standards-compliant pages are just mad because it's popular. Suuuuuure. The fact is that, if Gecko and KHTML were widely used, we'd be seeing utterly incredible advancements in web browsers because most websites would be designed to follow the W3C specs, because both KHTML and Gecko follow those specs.
Here's the scenario, in a world where Gecko and KHTML are dominant.
Both KHTML and Gecko follow W3C specs.
Most websites will be designed to follow W3C specs because of this.
Both KHTML and Gecko will render the majority of sites correctly.
Therefore, compatibility ceases to be a selling point, and features, like more intelligent ad-blocking and speed, become the main points for competition for the two engines.
The result? The consumer wins due to competition, which promotes advancement, and choice.
I know of no browser that has completely supported any W3C standard, and I know of no browser that has NOT introduced proprietary solutions. No browser has implemented complete Unicode support yet, and Unicode has been around for like, how many years? Hacks that I had to use in 1996 to write Greek (font face=symbol) don't work in Mozilla but at least you can still count on IE5.5 to read the tag. Today, I have to write Greek in Ascii escaped characters that only partially work in some browsers (not Netscape 4.X). Mac 9/10 won't read sans-serif fonts in IE 5.0, and won't recognize the break tag. It's absolutely crazy that one Standard was not agreed on 5 years ago and implemented by all the browser vendors. The difference comes between Standards Advocates (free, open, liberal) and Browser Vendors (proprietary, closed, conservative).
But I do like Amaya and I use it a lot to check my html. So the W3C has produced some good things. But the Standards roller derby should settle down, quit deprecating useful stuff, and concentrate on creating innovative useful stuff in their new projects and ongoing activities.
Consider the current "advance" from HTML to XHTML proposed by W3C. Is this an advance? At one time, anybody could write a valid HTML page with a text edit using a minimum of tags. If the person happened to use some "proprietary extension," that part of the code was simply not rendered properly in browsers that didn't support that extension. But a person could write a perfectly valid, cross platform web page using a basic set of tags & attributes.
If we look toward XHMTL, the person would not be able to produce a single page but would have to use HTML and a stylesheet, just to reproduce what worked perfectly well with the tag-extension system. Presumably, XHTML will weed out a lot of hobbyists & force the rest to buy increasingly expensive software to manage the development process.
Take a look at the prices for W3C membership. The "standards body" thus becomes dominated by "the industry" (which has reasons for wanting to promote increasingly expensive development tools) & academe (which has reasons for wanting all web page authors to have to enroll in its classes).
Yes, without standards we get stuck in a Tower of Babel. But the trend to increasingly complicated standards & wholesale deprecation of accepted practice reeks of being more than a bit self-serving to those who can afford membership in the "standards bodies"...
Again, my .02. YMMV. WWFD?
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Absolutely Hogwash.
The only people you will here ranting about standards being a annonyance are:
1) People who equate innovative software with proprietary, secret ownership, also know as "Intellectual Property Rights" idiots.
Specifically, propritary software becomes more valuable because you can make it illegal to write software that does the same thing, or even interoperates with it.
2) People who don't like standards LOVE proprietary ones so that they can jack the cost of software that we pay for through the roof.
3) People who don't like standards are usually companies that have a monopoly on the marketplace and find standards a threat because it allows competition to interoperate with thier products and allow consumer choice.
Everyone knows that in the TRUE BUSINESS MODEL, choice is bad for the consumer, right?
4) People who don't like standards:
Bill Gates "Standards Stifle our innovative product EULA's, our software that calls home on your internet connection dime. If only we had a proprietary protocol so you couldn't find out those things. MMmmmm, who was that Attorney General we paid off? Get whoever it is on the phone now! I want to do some innovative goverment bribery!"
Ballmer "That Dancing Monkey Man"
SCO "You made a standard that put us out of business. HOW DARE YOU! Where is our legal products department? We are going to sell you a lawsuit instead! You must buy it I am afraid, its the LAW. Muahahahahahahaha."
5) Finally those who don't like standards are anti business. No standards means tons of proprietary products that don't interoperate together. No interoperating products means no competition in a market sector because it is too expensive to develope for (End legal proceedings, royalties, and of course the kitchen sink which investors find is not a great place to wash thier money down the drain...)
No investors no money to fund great ideas.
Is it any wonder, the major technological innovations occurring today in operating systems development is with Linux.
The only thing Microsoft can do is secretly copy the source code into each XP release, which they do.
You will never know either, because you could go to jail if you found out they were doing it with the screwy IP (Intellectual Property) laws here in the US.
And Finally...
The US economy, specifically, the technology sector is sick.
No I take that back, it isn't sick, it is in its death throws. I am not sure just how many realize that most of the small innovative companies in the US are no longer.
The only thing the US has left is a small bunch of companies, that are too busy "innovating":
Like WorldCom who is putting new innovative techniques into how to change thier name so they can screw more investors over like a cheap whore on the street corner.
Which, by the way, you get more for your money.
Yeah, the tech sector in the US just looks great. I can't wait to see what kind of crappy products are comming out next year from Microsoft, and everyone else in the software industry, currently being run by goons like SCO, Microsoft.
Yeah! American innovation at its finest!
-Hack
2)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You forgot another benefit... Any quirks that do exist will actually be fixed. Especially with the increased feedback generated by a larger userbase.
Correctly means:
"IE6.0 is CSS 'compliant'".
So, IE advertises that it is compliant, and we know that it is not. It is not the rest of the world proclaiming that IE isn't compliant when in fact it is.
But we know that IE has its share of CSS foibles, such as implementing borders and padding from the outside in, when the standard says to do it from the inside out.
Or that one bug gets fixed from IE5.5 and the followon behavior is broken in IE6.
Or, heck, how about the differences between IE5.x on the Mac and IE5.x on Windows.
In my day, we didn't have "1", but we got by with 0 factorial just fine!
You can bend over and take it if you want to, but I won't.
I read the clarification, and soon thought "this guy is talking about Java and .NET, and he is on the Java side". Then I reached the bottom of the page and saw that he is employed by Sun...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
they for the people who are going to try to USE the software so that they have cleasr and understandable processes and APIs.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I've been playing around with Safari (KHTML), and it's utter bullshit that it's any more spec-compliant than IE/Win. Numerous things are broken or outright wierd.
I suppose it's "spec compliant" in the same way that Mozilla 0.6 was "spec compliant" -- only if you ignore the 10000 things that aren't implemented or actually crash the browser.
I wish Microsoft would live up to some standards, like an operating sytem that oh I dunno... OPERATES!?
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Microsoft wanted credit for creating standards and being innovative, so they launched an assault of crappy standards at the IETF. In most cases they wound up publishing an informational RFC (as should have happened), but in several instances they published experimental or standards track RFCs. Some of these were good (as MS has some very smart people working for them), but many were bad, showed serious lack of understanding in their design space, duplicated the functions of one or more exisiting protocols, and ignored standard conventions in field placement.
Documents like those mentioned above lead to the complaints I get fairly regularly from marketing in my current job, the complaints are all along the lines of: "you don't support RFC xyz" (where RFC xyz is informational describing a vendor specific extension, or experimental). My reply is that we studied the document, determined the cost of supporting the feature, and decided not to.
This sets off a little firestorm every time. "But it's an RFC and customer blah blah blah is demanding it", not understanding or caring about the diffence in RFC types or the fact that most of our equipment cannot support the extension in question. It has that magic title and we have to support it, despite the fact that there is often another way within existing, proven, and implemented standards to accomplish the task.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I'd be curious to know exactly how FTP transfers themselves are slowed by the protocol. I'm aware that FTP uses a bass-ackwards scheme involving opening too damned many ports and only using one of them at a time, but I'm still curious about how the actual transfer could be made faster.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...the standardization process can. At least it has for C. Look at C99, and it's got a few tweaks here and there, and some of it's dubious. I wonder who was requesting some of these features. Meanwhile, C's biggest problem IMHO, the lack of any standard for graphics, network programming, standard data structures, etc. that most new languages have, remains unadressed.
Some of the stuff that gets introduced into standard C comes from gcc. You know it's bad when Open Source is consistantly innovating more than you are (asbestos suit on).
Now, to counter this, there are plenty of defacto standards used with C. The standardization body could save itself a lot of work by endorsing OpenGL, BSD-style sockets, etc. They won't even do that!
So, very few useful applications are written in pure ISO standard C. Thus, standards don't slow innovation, but if you want to innovate you have to work outside the standard.
For something like C, the standard remains valuable if you isolate the standard code from the non-standard code. For other things, isolation may not be practical. In that case, the standard doesn't stifle innovation--the standard itself just falls to a very low value. Case in point: VRML, which I used to mess with. It's now relegated to a small enthusiast niche. Why? Because it can't keep up with other 3-d formats. In that field, performance matters more than standardization.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Common wisdom, especially in distributed computing, says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard.
No, the common wisdom is that the right approach in a MIXED environment when one wants a solution that is 1. easy to maintain, 2. easy to distribute, and 3. has low barriers to entry is to use a standard.
In his followup, he suggests that he isn't referring to anything in particular. But let's take an example: Java. In my company, we use a java-based web client for timecards. Now, in theory Java is a standard. In practice, the timecard only works with certain combinations of JVM, web client, and OS, because the dingbats who wrote the client simply did what worked, and didn't follow the standard.
Now, on the other hand, we have some software that's written using priority code. Why? Because it's more effective, and we don't need to port it to other platforms. For that, standards are not necessary.
Over the years I have seen many standards. When I started in this game in 1987 AT&T had the System V Interface Definition and I spent time making sure it was correct on Unisys released UNIX systems. I was able to stop strange mods to the kernel based on the fact that they would break SVID compiance. This was good and there are many others. Having said that I think many here have missed the point of the article. STANDARDS SHOULD MAKE SENSE. Many standards make since for the company pushing it hopping to make licensing revenue off of it. Others just want their standard accepted because they are early and do not want to change again. If the standard is a pure effort of one company to make a buck then it is probable wrong for the industry in general. Do not rate this article on the basis of the TCP/IP network stack. This is a standard that has been modified to fit several times and is an industry wide effort. Indeed it started as a government effort. It does not fit the catagory of standards this article is referent to. Want an example? Read the PIGMIG Redundant System Slot API standard. It will work well with an RSS implentation on a particular system. I will not say which one because it is irrelavent. For other systems there are way to many generics and users of the sub system will need alot of knowledge of the particular hardware they are running on and the implementation will never be portable. It was rammed through by one big chip maker so they could claim standards compience.
Yeah, let's get rid of standards. We can then create crud such as yenc ;)
;)
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html
I likes it 'cause it works for me an' to hell with all the rest of you!
I have a crazy idea for codecs: Embed the codec itself into the header of the media file so that the player can play the movie without having to know about the codec or codec version ahead of time.
Of course this can't work due to the number of and type of codec systems in various players, but perhaps if a framework was made where by the codec was embedded in some symbolic format so that it could be compiled by the player.
It's an interesting idea that at least allows for a lot of flexibility in codecs without having it hardcoded into the player.
It's been out for like 5 months, not 10 years! Besides, Safari is Apple's BETA version of a KHTML browser. Look at Konqueror if you want to see KHTML at its best. Regardless, I invite you to find as many HTML rendering problems as there are in IE, not beta bugs
If you want to be a dumbass about it IE didn't even have tables until version 2.0
... but how exactly is this "flamebait"?
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
is a new one, at least as far as hinging product development.
The Internet was not built based on standards. In "Where Wizards Never Sleep", the story of the founding of the Internet, not one standard was used to design and build ARPA-net. Standards eventually emerged, but they were after-the-fact.
Read "Fire in the Valley", the story of the birth of the personal computer industry. This was one of the most innovative periods in our history. And not ONE industry standard was used. Rather, Apple, Osborne, etc. created their products, from which eventually standards emerged. Again, after-the-fact.
Go back further in time. IBM was not the industry leader from the 1930's til the 1980's because of industry standards, but rather IBM's own, internal, proprietary standards.
Standards are a nice way to not have to innovate and think. Just use a standard! But is what is developed by a committee always the best thing from a time or technology standpoint? Isn't it a sort of socialist or communist type approach? A Borgian way of doing things?
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
I work in the telecoms equipment sector.. no one wants to buy gear unless we either support certain standards, or will be supporting them imminently.
TL1, SNMP come to mind. (not to mention someone wanting OC-1 support)
Then you're selecting the wrong standards. First thing's first; you can't reasonably expect any browser, letalone all browsers to properly support all bleeding-edge standards. Your best bet is to select a baseline standard you're going to use, be it one, two, or three year old standards and use those. Find the most current set that all major browsers (IE, Mozilla/Gecko, Opera) support to your satisfaction and use it. All the web design I do works just fine between all major (and even most of the minor) browsrs and it all validates with the W3.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
There's some disturbing parallels in the structure and order of Waldo's text to that of Clay Shirky's "AN OPEN LETTER TO JAKOB NIELSEN". The Shirky article is old, but the link to it was on the front page of his site recently...
Clay's pretty well known, too. This isn't as blatant as seeing Erik Wolpaw's game reviews reappear on other websites under different bylines, but it certainly calls into question Mr. Waldo's integrity...
Wait, what am I saying, this is the internet, that article is some engineer's blog, journalistic integrity is dead anyway. Carry on.
-jpowers
The great TCP/IP vs. OSI debate that raged in the 1980s is a great example of what this guy is talking about. On the one hand, you had TCP/IP, a relatively simple protocol that had evolved informally over a period of years (de facto standard); and OSI, a much more complex, hard-to-implement standard that was developed by an ISO committee (de jure standard). For several years, many industry observers figured that OSI was going to replace TCP/IP, if only because of the high-powered corporations that were getting behind it. But what emerged from the ISO OSI process was a bloated mess of a standard, virtually unimplementable because it tried to do everything to please everybody. Fortunately, TCP/IP was so entrenched by the time the OSI standard was released, that no one seriously considered replacing the one with the other.
...
So what this demonstrates, since it appears that a lot of posters didn't actually read the article: de facto standards are usually good, because at least we know they describe technologies that work. De jure standards are usually bad, because they tend to be about political compromise rather than the quest for good technology.
Remember the old Dilbert cartoon, where the sales rep gushes, "this device conforms to all international communications protocols" and Dilbert replies, "so it does nothing useful and it's not your fault" ?
From the article: Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java.
Probably just a coincidence that he works on Java for Sun, who steadfastly refuses to submit Java to any standards body.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
This kowtowing to the god of standards is, I believe, doing great damage to our industry,
Let's cut to the chase. Sun has renegged on their promise to standardize Java and Sun's employees are trying to make excuses for that reprehensible behavior.
Yes, standards may, sometimes, inhibit innovation. That's why standardization takes a long time as people hash things out and figure things out. You stick with a standardization process until the core parts are not innovative anymore. That may take a few years, or a couple of decades (as in the case of C++). What counts is the commitment, the process, and the eventual outcome.
The long-standing standards are those that were first de facto standards, and were described (no invented) by the standards bodies.
Yes, like Windows. That's, however, the kind of standard we want to avoid. That's why the industry accepted Java with open arms when Sun promised to standardize it quickly. Then Sun did a 180 degree turn and said "actually, we would much prefer to make Java a proprietary, de-facto standard, like Microsoft does with Windows; screw our customers and screw the standards process".
In different words, the cost of subjecting Java to a standardization process was taken into account when the industry adopted Java. Sun's behavior is unacceptable and shows that the company is not to be trusted, and the software industry should drop Java.
Something that is not a standard is closed, proprietary, and to be avoided at all costs.
No, not at all. Open source software may not conform to a standard, but it's not "closed" or "proprietary".
Something that is "closed and proprietary", is rightfully viewed with suspicion, because customers place themselves into a position of paying an arm and a leg (the vendor can keep charging a bit extra because of the cost of switching to something else)--just like Microsoft does.
Something that was initially distributed with the promise of becoming both open and standard conforming and then later was changed into something closed and proprietary should be rejected by any rational user because it has all the risks and costs of another proprietary standard and because the company has already clearly demonstrated that it is not to be trusted. Like Sun and Java.
I haven't seen this relevant quote in the comments yet (perhaps I missed it):
"The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from" - A. Tanenbaum
The issue of many standards for the same thing would seem to me to arise out of standards being set prematurely, possibly because of what is discussed in the article.
The problem with the voting system is that the guy who lost the election can file frivolous lawsuits in an pointless attempt to overthrow the actual election results.
This happened in 2000, and it was all a waste of time. The winner won, despite that the loser tried.
Crap.
Sure, standards can sometimes slow down innovation. Of course, nothing seems to slow down innovation quite as effectively as the words "de facto".
Frankly, Microsoft has really dropped the ball with IE. Considering the vast resources they have to throw at a project, it really is sort of pathetic that IE isn't any better than it is... sure Gecko has quirks, but it's just a flat-out better web browser than IE on any platform. Sure KHTML has bugs... it's a fuckin' beta -- with tabbed browsing, popup blocking, PNG alpha support, and in some cases better standards compliance.
If Microsoft were more intrested in the quality of their web browser than in integrating it with their operating system and figuring out ways to generate IE-only browser lock-in, they might find that they are in a position to strongly influence the direction web standards take.
True to form, Microsoft has the most widely used browser, but they've failed to make it the best browser because they're too busy trying to make it be the only browser.
I think I'll keep developing for Gecko & KHTML, thanks.
I don't like IE anymore than you do but your post doesn't make much sense.
As a proffesional web developer (going on five years now) I can say that I have not experienced the degree of problems with IE that you seem to have had. I code by hand using CSS and at least HTML 4.
IE had decent CSS 1 support before Mozilla really got off the ground and today is definitly on par with Gecko in following the standards. Are there descrepancies? sure a few but its not difficult to get around them. I'd say that 95% of the time my code works in both IE and Moz without a whole lot of tweaking. I honestly have more problems with Opera (though 7 was a huge improvement) and KHTML.
Also the lead designer here uses Dreamweaver which while not perfect still uses CSS and generally valid mark-up. A lot of times bad code in the editors is more a result of people not knowing how to use the tool. For instance our designer tends to nest tables (slowly getting him away from that) to produce a desired layout. The only way that's Dreamweaver's fault is if you said they need to abstract page layout more so developers will get away from using tables to do it. Of course then the problem is still Netscape 4 which is heavily used in government and big corps.
I'm not trying to flame you but you really sound like one of those people that doesn't fully understand the tool and blames the app.
The Anti-Blog
They allow people with varying levels of knowledge, access to technology.
... damn.
But if we toss the standards, then only those with certain arcane knowledge (like nerds and geeks) will rule those tiny-brained jocks and cheerleaders and shoved us around in high school.
So, personally, I say get rid of the standards and make all those mouth breathers suffer.
But, then again, you know me. Always wanting absolute and total power to crush those perceived as weaker.
Wait
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I think the question of standards depends on where you're trying to go.
If you're trying to get somewhere, why not use the standards that are out there, and build off of them? Developing protocols/standards takes a lot of budget and planning. However, there's nothing preventing you from innovating beyond those standards.
Nobody says that you can't build your own protocols for your project, either. It will just take you longer to get from point A (beginning) to point B (end). Standards work because they're already planned out.
The emperor is naked.
Seriously, how "controversial" is it? There are like 12 responses to the blog. Not exactly the kind of stuff that gets people out protesting on the street.
headline
<p>Paragraph one has something to say</p>
<h2>Something is related</h2>
<p>Which is why paragraph two is relevant</p>
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Funny you should mention this. I'm right in the middle of implementing an OMG standard for describing a certain type of research experiment.
/disbelief
/Valley Girl voice, Pitch = High
Speaking of standards, I doubt I'm the only one who read this as either:
OMG = OH...MY...GOD
or
OhMyGaaaad!
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
To tell you the truth I quit using Dreamweaver after I found myself counting literally hundreds of font tags in its output. I will concede that people may get it to produce clean output but in my experience it produced grotesque code, so I quit using it. The only other people I know personally who use it were incompetent (by that I mean they couldn't code by hand if their life depended on it) and so I concluded after a time that a WYSIWYG editor is not the tool of choice for a picky developer. But, as I said way up there somewhere I've barely been paid to do this for a year now.
Even if I don't understand the tool, I understand the fundamentals that the tool brings to the user, and that's what's important.
Telling the truth is not being a dumbass. mr. apologist.
I guess IE is also totally standards compliant in your book, because by 8.0 they will certainly have fixed all the problems.
Somehow believe standardization originally helped the industry but over the years standardization has become more of a marketing vehicle. Most of today's standards are just intended to sell one product.
I went to a restaurant one day that had "Soup Du Jour of the day" on the menu.
Burma?
Barring some connection between the two (...), there is no connection between the two.
You think? That's pretty deep, man.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
...we need to standardize the term "standard"?
No wonder we have so many problems!
It's a beta, you fucking idiot. It hasn't even reached v1.0 yet. Internet Explorer is on v6.0, and it still isn't fully CSS-1 compliant. Safari hasn't even reached v1.0, and it's more compliant with standards than Internet Explorer is at v6.0.
SQL is a so-so relational language, but it is a popular standard for whatever reason. I would like to see more competition, because I think there is so much room for improvement WRT relational languages.
(The last time I stated this opinion, I was modded as a "troll". I don't know why. Please reply this time instead of, or at least after, you mod me, please.)
Table-ized A.I.
Rockwell modem standards Ha. We'll make modems brain dead. Printer call standards, you are dreaming.
HTML was a great idea, then along comes sneaky proprietary system calls for IE. Yuk. Standards do not fly if one company is allowed to steal the show and use so called standards like a moving target.
Every time my ISP (telus.net) upgrades its MS server some piece of crap gets added that rejects Internet directing request packets from anything other than Windows. Then I need to call the techs, ping their front end, which is always still there returning pings. Then while I am talking to them get Linux eth0 recognised again. The Microsoft obfuscation bullshit just goes on and on and on.........
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
artima.com: "Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the lead Jini architect."
Ok... and? How many "lead architects" are there out there? Every hardware manufacture has a lead architect, why is this guy's opinion special enough to be given a article on /.?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The upside of standards is that mass production and competition is enabled by them.
Sure, you don't need a standard for something home grown small scale system, but that's not the point.
Can you imagine the current prices for wireless networks without standards ?
In another sector: How many nuts and bolts would be needed by your auto repair shop if standards didn't exist?
-- From Denmark
Prescriptive standards (when specified competently, which is by no means easy or certain) enable competing implementations to coexist; descriptive standards would too but those are becoming rare as desperate vendors bet on strategic incompatibility.
There is hardly ever one standard for an area. Standards are not defined by being solitary, they are defined by consistency. The standard is a consistent set of features. It allows interoperability. Standards cast too young will not become long term standards, but it was still a standard.
Don't use something b/c it's a standards, know it because it is one.
-pyrrho
And he's not a shill for Sun by any means. More a shill for Jini and RMI maybe.. but not Sun. You may not consider it a standard in the classic sense, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some jabs at J2EE in there and Sun's recent fascination with XML. That may be where the bee got in his bonnet from... not from Sun's lack of standardization of Java.
:)
Jim's been a long time maverick.. not all that favored inside Sun, he's really opinionated too. But in general he thinks a lot before he talks.. no matter what he says about just letting it fly..
Check out Ken Arnold's weblog on there too. They've worked together a lot and Ken is a little more direct with his jabs
I haven't seen many postings discussing the impact that standards can have on public safety.
For instance, in 1904 Baltimore had a huge fire which many surrounding communities responded to help out.
Unfortunatly the fittings on the hoses and hydrants wern't compatable in many cases resulting in the fire destroying over 70 blocks and 1300 buildings.
This raised national attention for the need to standardize fire hose couplings and screw threads.