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).

Not the Right Question

[lux55]

The problem isn't with the quantity of standards, but the quality of specific ones. Standardization itself makes sense in a lot of cases, but sometimes standards are indeed made for the wrong reasons, or over-architected into oblivion (ie. SOAP + WSDL + UDDI + how many SOAP security standards) which makes the barrier to entry for compliance with those standards far too high to expect most people to bother.

Another problem is that a failure of some parties to properly adhere to the standards causes those standards to become less useful as well (read: MSIE vs. Mozilla, inconsistent HTML support, partial CSS support, JScript vs. JavaScript). This is sometimes even made possible by the standards themselves, by being too vague, which necessitates a level of "interpretation". It's also not always strategic for companies to follow standards -- they prevent lock-in, they make it easier to lose your customers to your competitors, and that can actually decrease the value of your products by giving your customers something to hold over your head during price negotiations. Standards need better incentives to get companies to actually buy into them, as opposed to just saying they are and then going and making their own "standards".

The other problem is that standardization, especially when the industry is in the middle of such a pro-standards push, often comes too early in the life of a given technology, resulting in a standard that doesn't account for the whole problem yet. For example, RSS was declared a standard before it was ever really adopted, and then some limitations were found in it that to fix would break backward compatibility. The result is a number of incompatible competing standards (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS/RDF, Atom, etc.). SOAP and XML-RPC both did the same thing, and the result is that it's a pain in the ass for developers to support them, due to certain limitations in their designs (array support in SOAP, reflection as an afterthough in XML-RPC, etc.). SOAP and XML-RPC also resulted in a 3rd competitor as well, REST.

So my answer would be that there aren't too many standards, but that standards are just like anything else: not necessarily applicable to every situation. Use proper discretion. Neither extreme (all standards vs. no standards) is a good thing.