Are There Too Many Standards?

CyNRG asks: "Lately, I've been reviewing the different programming and protocol standards in an effort to guide my career in the most fun and profitable direction. The proliferation of standards is astounding! Choosing which path to follow is more like a trip to Las Vegas. Standing at the craps table in Ceasar's Palace at 3:00 am: do I play the point? Big 6 or 8? Play the field? How about covering the hard ways? The world is using technology more and more, so I would expect more standards based on that fact. It seems like common knowledge, vis-a-vis Microsoft, that companies try to put forth 'standards' in an roll of the dice to make their 'standard' defacto. Are there too many standards?"

Comments

Re: Craps

[the morgawr]

Standing at the craps table in Ceasar's Palace at 3:00 am: do I play the point? Big 6 or 8? Play the field? How about covering the hard ways?

You should choose either "Pass" or "Don't Pass", bet the maximum odds you can after the point is established and do the same for two "come" or "don't come" bets.

This will give the best odds to walk away a winner (with the house keeping a razor thin edge).

Examples

[JohnFluxx]

What examples are there of too many _open_ standards causing a problem?

Re:It's like the old saw

[Josh Booth]

Actually, the people saying that there are too many standards often have a new one in mind that encompasses or does the same thing as a few others so that he can say "if you just use my standard, you only have to use one and not three!" So yes, it can and will get worse.

Untested Standards

[seanmceligot]

I believe the problem arises when standards are written before being tested in the wild and without using time-tested techniques.

This was the problem with EJB. All these companies implemented the standard, but the standard that had never been tried before. Only now, are people realizing what a mistake it was.

With the various XML standards, time wasn't allowed to work out the flaws, and to allow various standards to merge. So, we have a bunch of standards and none of them are quit right.

The thing about standards is...

[macz]

They are mutually exclusive to a point. For instance, most rail guage for trains is of 2 widths in the whole world. It would be silly to have 14 different guages scattered around the major railroads of the world and try to say that there is some kind of standard.

How does a spec become a standard? People recognize the relative benefits of a spec versus the proprietary advantages of doing it their own way. Since standards tend to emerge in discrete verticals, there isn't a dilution of this benefit.

It would not be incorrect to say that a "standard" is really an honorific applied to the spec that won in the marketplace of ideas. If the discrete vertical you chose to be the "standard" in is trivial, then it will be a pyhric victory. If it is non-trivial, even if a better idea comes along, you will have a marked advantage as the "incumbent" standard. (QWERTY vs Dvorak keyboard layouts as an example). Eventually, if enough people see the benefit vs the advantage of the existing standard... new standard.

Re:Three acronyms

[Blakey Rat]

MacOS Classic used *only* CR with no linefeed at all, and to my knowledge the only program in Windows that uses CRLF is Notepad (for backwards-combatibility with DOS text files), meaning the splitup is more like:

*nix: LF
DOS: CRLF
MacOS Classic: CR
Windows (except Notepad): LF
MacOS X: LF

Considering the newest versions of the platforms are Linux (LF), OS X (LF) and Windows (LF) it looks like we finally have some sort of standard going on. Woot.