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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?"
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
The tests would be: "Does that standard meet the needs of disparate groups of people who may be using a tool for different purposes within an organized framework? Is the standard accessible? Also critically important: "does that standard lock one into a narrowly defined structure that is difficult to extend or modify as needs change? Is the standard backwards/forwards compatible? To answer your final question, standards become formalized when they begin to meet these tests and are adopted by appropriate shareholders. This of course is aside from issues of criteria definition, or guidelines which often begin to take on lives of their own and bastardize "standards".
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If rich, the follow the informal standard. If right, ignore it.
If you're very, very lucky, right & rich converge, but if its either/or I think my 1st 2 sentences sum it up.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
CC.
P.S.: An excellent article!
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Man, when I was in college, we had 8 or 9 different "Industry Standards". While most teachers were absolutely convinced that their method was the "Industry Standard", there were a few knowledgable enough to explained the whole thing to us. Mostly when people talk about "Industry Standards", it's manager-speak for "The Way We Do Things Here." So if you don't follow the "Industry Standards", you will not be working for long.
Also keep in mind that "Industry Standards" in the sense that I'm talking about has absolutely nothing to do with real ISO or QS standards. Those are actual organizations that create a set of standard rules for companies to follow, usually for the safety of workers and quality assurance of products. No, I'm just talking BS manager-speak...
IMHO monopoly, patents, non-free available information about a specification is the dead to a public acceptable standard.
Without the above the best of breed will prevail and become "de facto standard".
Just a pity that when a company has the monopolicy on their market they only risk market share when using "good" standards, capitalism is good for starting up an economy however sometimes it is better to do some thing "socially" it's for the common good.
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It's de facto when it requires no further explination.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just because it has a stamp of approval from a big-name standards organization doesn't at all mean it's viable, though if it's not, it probably does mean that it's already popular in some way and someone wanted a stamp of approval for the sake of having it.
... but we can't say "we don't support HL7 because we think it's stupid" without being laughed at. So you support it. And once you're done with that, you're too tired to go implement another spec that makes more sense, so you do what everyone else does: advertise that your software is HL7-compliant and therefore compatible with "every other major piece of software" in the medical industry (where "major" == "supports HL7", circular logic.)
Like, say, HL7 for medical information exchange. The format sucks (we constantly find ways in which it can't handle the true cardinality of relations, because people assumed way too much)
Sure. It's standard. And approved (ANSI.) And widely used. And it sucks. (And no, moving it to XML in v3 doesn't make it any better.)
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end. The formats used by the Microsoft Office applications have become a de facto standard, giving Microsoft a substantial competitive edge because each new release of its software can deliver for it a window of opportunity during which only its software is fully compatible; this is mitigated a bit, though, because incompatibility in a new version makes customers slow to upgrade to that newest version.
Not true. Even Microsoft makes its products backward compatible. (One might say they make their products backwards, but that is another story).
In some cases, a standard comes with some kind of licensing restrictions, or involves something that someone has a patent on. For instance, Unisys had a patent governing a bit of the algorithm used for GIF images. In general, patents are a huge weakness for a standard. The MP3 standard is used very widely by people who simply don't know -- or don't care -- that someone theoretically has a patent on part of it, and only some code using the patented algorithm actually has a license from the patent holder. Developers and users can be bitten by this many years after they make the design decision to use a patented algorithm, due to the nature of patents. De jure standards often require contributors to clearly disclose any known patents; de facto standards generally have no way to do this.
Software patents are evil. Full stop. It has nothing to do with standards.
Ironically, this article, published by IBM, fails to mention how once IBM itself used to be a de facto standard for PCs.
Iran captures three CIA agents
A standard is a good one when it has an open interface, regardless of whether it's 'official' or not. The relevant question is, "Can I interface with this 'standard'?" If the answer is "no", proper systems engineering becomes impossible, and everyone suffers.
i've always felt that de facto realities are more important than formal ones. after all, in a legal sense, a cop can't violate your miranda rights. however, no physical force you're likely to possess is gonna stop the cop from putting a beatdown on you if you honk him/her off.
similarly: a lot of employers maintain codes of conduct, most of which include an "acceptable usage policy" (AUP). how useful and fun a site would slashdot be if everyone abided by the actual terms of the AUP?
ed
Why is it a problem? It saves space, increasing readability, and avoids this horrible bug:
for(int i=0;i<10;i++);
{
[loop body]
}
I am trolling
I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard
I realize that it isn't core to your point, but...MPEG2 is the most portable and cross-platform for a web video? Maybe in DVD players, however it's one of the most license/patent encumbered standards out there, which is why you generally can't play MPEG2 on the desktop unless it's in DVD form and you have the appropriate software/hardware.
Here's a better question. What makes a blessed standard viable? A standard is only as good as it's market penetration, and defacto is the only standard that makes a lick of difference. Don't buy it? Go ahead, write your site in SVG, your competitors will use flash and make money while people scratch their heads when they read "plugin needed" on your page.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
MS Word *.doc is a standard because 80% of the desktop market runs MS Word.
Just becuase it's closed doesn't mean it's not a standard
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But then again, there was no private organization that benefitted from which side of the road people used. If Ford made money from the left side, and GM from the the right, then we can well imagine there would be a battle for which side of the road we drove on, and which side would probably vary from location to location. ("Hey New York, I'll give you a million bucks if you require people to drive on the left!")
Take away the private interests, and people will naturally organize themselves to one format or another. And, in most cases, consumers will be better off for it. The only reason they may be worse off is if people rally around an inferior standard, but that's probably more likely to happen with private interests.
Moving on to my opinion....the answer isn't to have the government force one standard or another on us. The answer is to have the government force the private interests to allow us to choose a standard with a minimum of baggage that comes with it. e.g., Don't force everyone to use .DOC, simply make it so that if you choose to use .DOC, you can use it with Word, OpenOffice, or whatever.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
This really is something that everyone in this community should be taking to heart. This is why Linux has had difficulty breaking into heavy usage, why hundreds of projects (including open source software projects) have failed, and why we haven't moved to better architectures in the computing world.
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end.
I think that's probably one of the most important statements in the article. If every reader who plans on writing any code, coming up with a piece of hardware, or decides to rethink Support conventions were to take the heart of that message and put it into their plans, we'd really start making headway in the real world with real innovation.
In summary: Your idea may be good, but that doesn't mean squat in the market. What DOES matter is: How much of a headache is your solution to X going to give me versus what I already have? Yet I STILL get asked by my co-worker why we aren't using Linux for our desktop PCs...
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It doesn't exist on my machine, so to ME it's not standard.
It WON'T exist on my machine. This is intentional. So if you intend to sell to me, you don't use it.
A standard is the right way to do things, commonly accepted. It a proposed approach shuts out a large (not majority, but large...for some meaning of large) then that approach is not standard.
So far two criteria: I won't consider anything as a standard if I can't or won't use it. (And I use pdf's, despite despising Adobe.)
OK, pdfs are a standard, at least a standard subset of pdf is a standard. (Adobe keeps trying to extend the pdf format...but that doesn't automatically make thier extensions a part of the pdf standard. It's their file format, so they can say what it can contain, but it only becomes standard with common acceptance.)
So something doesn't require approval of a standards body, and being pushed by the authority over the file format doesn't automatically make something standard.
Well, if a "standards" body approves a specification under, say, RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory), does this make it a standard? I assert that it not only does not make the specification a standard, it calls into question that body's right to call itself a "standards body". (I acknowledge that not everyone agrees with me on this, but that's the basis of this argument. If you don't accept it, you probably shouldn't accept the conclusion.)
Therefore a "standards body"'s approval doesn't automatically make something a standard. It does, however, mean that one should consider it. (Usually. I can think of a few exceptions.)
So, back to my original assertion, "A standard is the right way to do things, commonly accepted.":
When a standards body proposes something, that gives it a big leg up on being commonly accepted. Similarly, they are quite likely to notice or develop good ways to do things. Therefore it makes sense to attend to what they say, as worthy of attention, if not unthinking acceptance.
Also, when a method, e.g., pdf, becomes commonly used, someone will be in charge of it. (If they weren't originally, someone will muscle in.) These people will have ideas as to how the commonly use method, technique, or format should be changed or extended. These opinions are not necessarily worth paying much attention to, though they can be. In this case, common use is the dominating factor. (Presumably it wouldn't have come into common use unless it was a generally good way to do things.)
As a final matter, let us consider gifs. gifs were a standard developed on compuserve, and they worked well. Then someone announced "We own the patents rights on one of the steps used in making gifs. You can't use them without paying us!". At this point gifs became NOT the right way to do things, hence they stopped being a standard. Now the patent has expired, and gifs are again a standard. Here we see (among other things) that legal considerations may dominate the question of "Is this the right way to do things?" Technical considerations aren't the only consideration.
And NO, MS Word *.doc is NOT a standard. At best you could reasonably argue that it was a sheave of standards loosely bound together by a confusing similarity. I don't consider it even that, but I could hear reasoned arguments that one or more of those "standards" did fit "the right way to do things". Certainly it is, as you assert a commonly used sheave of file formats, but this does not suffice to render it a standard.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I sincerely hope you mean c, not the language C.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yes, the speed of light varies. But c is specifically the speed of light in vacuum. Only in vacuum the speed is equal for all observers, thus it is the vacuum speed upon which relativity is built.
On the other hand, the speed of light in vacuum may not be a constant after all. In some theories c is the expansion velocity of the universe in the fourth spatial dimension, therefore it is slowing down all the time. The slowing down has been reported in some recent experiments.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The Word .doc format is a de facto standard, in that it is commonly requested and accepted. People who write word processors or other document processor probably have to deal with it in some manner, even if to just dismiss or ignore.
It is not, however, a de jure standard, in that it has not been approved by one of the commonly accepted standards bodies (eg., ISO).
When you get down to it, the only standards that matter are the ones that that the targeted body accepts, either through formal or traditional means. The red/yellow/green lights at intersections only work because society accepts that those lights have some meaning. We have ratified those meanings through tradition and law, and so now they are a standard (presumably worldwide, but definitely in the US).
But when you get right down to it, they're just colored lights.
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