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Naturally Occurring Standards
An anonymous reader writes "The phrase 'de facto standard' can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?"
There's a lot more to HL7 v3 than just changing the message format to XML. They've completely redefined the message development process, for one. Also the range of things you can express in a message is comparable with any decent ontological language, although that expression itself may be very complex. I'm curious to know exactly what relationship cardinalities you can't express.
You can do XML with v2.x now, anyway.
Is there an "animated-postscript" format?
SVG is the closest thing. Unfortunately, your customers will need a plugin. Sadly, Flash is the "de-facto" standard in this case. If you really don't want to use flash, just use animated GIFs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Animated gif? Flash, maybe?
SVG might be your best bet, though.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
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This is a very big assertion; you might want to back it up. As for your statement about Ford and GM not being able to change people's mind, keep in mind that the US "drove on the right" long before cars were even invented. These conventions occured during colonial times with horses as well, long before the automobile was invented.
On a side note, there are two people that we have to thank for the fact that most people in the world drive on the right - Napoleon and Hitler. Napoleon introduced to many parts of Europe convention of keeping right when he rampaged through Europe and those conventions stuck around after his departure. After Napoleon, it was pretty much just Britain and the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) on the left side of the road. Hitler took care of the latter after the anschluss.
Until someone types a tab instead of spaces, and the application goes AWOL.
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Copied verbatim. Nice. What do we call dupes from other sites without credit? Oh, yeah, plagiarism
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Smile :)
I mean SMIL
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
Actually, Standard Guage is 4 feet, 8 and one half inches. The Roman chariot story is a myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Gauge
A de facto standard is the standard by default - nothing else exists, or can compete in terms of market share. This is different from a natural standard which exists naturally - not as a default, but as the result of a healthy ecosystem.
A natural standard, in practice, is no different than an "open standard": they both serve the same purpose and have the same end result. Take the SMB protocol for instance (at least for the most part).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Great Britain and Australia have seen their violent crime rates soar since revoking the right of ordinary citizens to own guns.
No, we haven't. (Not in Australia, at least.)