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Bell's Axioms on Standards

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-interesting-than-you-think dept.

CowboyRobot writes "The inimitable Gordon Bell has a 5-page article at ACM Queue on the difficulties and necessities of standards adoption, in which he lays out 11 axioms on how to best establish and adopt standards. He quotes MIT's Dave Clark, 'Standards setting sits in a boring trough between two exciting peaks. The first is the peak of technical innovation, and the second is the billion-dollar investment or market.' It's often the rush for money that makes us move to fast to do the job right."

5 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The best thing about standards... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    W3C CSS, which microsoft DID (lying through their teeth) claim compliance with (and the freaking wrote half the spec!), DOES set out a number of ways in which a page must be _rendered_ to be compliant, you goon.

    Microsoft broke their implementation, apparently deliberately, in ways which mean if you're a web-page graphic artist, you _have_ to decide whether to code for IE, or every other browser. A site which looks perfect in IE simply _can't_ look perfect in a real CSS-compliant browser, because of stuff like coordinates being measured from different origins. So you either make two versions of your site and use browser detection code, or don't use any advanced formatting functionality at all.

  2. Re:The best thing about standards... by cygnusx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Parent is technically correct. HTML is not a standard in the classic ISO/IEC sense, neither is it (the modern versions at least) an IETF standards-track RFC. It is a W3C TR (Technical Recommendation) which is what passes for "standard" in the biz. User-agents who render HTML SHOULD comply with the TR although this has never been an absolute (MUST) requirement, except with the alistapart crowd -- and the kneejerk /. standards brigade ;-). OTOH user-agents which render HTML are also HTTP clients, and they must follow RFC 2616 and friends or be called "broken".

    The HTML TRs document the semantics for each tag (although the tags themselves have bits of mostly legacy presentation oriented attributes). How each browser implements it is upto it -- for example, a browser targeted to Indic cultures may choose to boldface EM text since Indic scripts have no notion of italics.

    On the other hand, browsers claiming CSS Vx support are obliged to render stuff *exactly* the way the specs mandate, and the CSS specs are fairly detailed on this score. And here, IMO, criticism of IE is valid, not because MS does not support every last bit of the CSS standard (no one does) but because they have shown _no inclination_ to fix their glaring omissions even years after IE6's release (a.k.a the NN4 syndrome), making life miserable for web devs everywhere.

  3. Re:Internet Standards... by hugesmile · · Score: 4, Informative
    I think it is a frightening thing, but very much worth noting, that since the Internet left academia in the early ninetees, not a single new protocol or application has a widely accepted standard. Every single new application that has come along since then has been a hodge-podge of incompatible solutions.

    History will be the judge, but I think if you rolled back the clock to the eighties, you would say exactly the same thing about technologies that we take for granted now, as standards.

    Case in Point:

    Network protocols: The internet protocol suite was far from being the only protocol (or even the dominant one). SNA, for one, was incompatible and entrenched. And at the lower three layers of the OSI Model, X.25 didn't even consider random routing from a single point, as TCP/IP does.

    See this table for a bunch of examples of non-TCP/IP protocols that are a hodge-podge of incompatible solutions.

    Nothing has changed as of the nineties. Same problem, but the shakeout takes time.

  4. Re:The best thing about standards... by bunratty · · Score: 2, Informative
    Browsers are under _no_ obligation to implement it and can render it however they see fit but obviously its in their interest to be compatible. This was my point. There is no official standard that says a browser must do anything.
    Looking at the HTML standard, I see many things that a user agent (which is what a browser is) must do:
    • User agents must not evaluate script data as HTML markup but instead must pass it on as data to a script engine.
    • User agents must follow the steps set out in the section on specifying character encodings in order to determine the character encoding of an external resource.
    • To facilitate the introduction of these extensions, conforming user agents must be able to parse the media attribute value as follows
    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  5. Re:The best thing about standards... by bunratty · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sorry, but HTML and CSS are not standards in any way: they are recommendations from a consortium that on the whole has very little power compared to the one held by other players in the field.
    And what "power" does ANSI or ISO have compared to the companies that implement their standards?
    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.