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?"

Comments

Formally informal

[AKAImBatman]

In my experience, things become an informal standard because either someone with a lot of influence says it should be (e.g. Microsoft) or the technology just makes a lot of sense and hits the market at the right time (e.g. Java).

Just remember: Microsoft Office is an informal standard, as is Microsoft Windows. Of course, if you ask Microsoft, it's all "the industry standard".

(Which reminds me of an amusing story. My company had a third party do a web video for us at one point. The third party then asked us what format we wanted it in. I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard. We then got back a WMV file with a note about Windows Media being "the industry standard". Apparently the only reason they asked was that they wanted to know if we wanted the file coded as VBR or not.)

Re:Formally informal

[gad_zuki!]

There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.

Standard...

[xtracto]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=standard Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence.

What makes [or should make] something standard is the wide acceptance from the population. And after all, that is a standard. As an example (trying not to flamebait) Microsoft could try to standaraize his .DOC format, but if people wont use it, it wont be a standard (it wont matter if it is an ISO-XXXX standard). Of course, now, .DOC is a kind of document standard.

Analogy: urban architects, folksonomy

[otisg]

Good urban architects don't impose pavements on people. They let people walk freely and observe the walking routes and patterns. Then they put down the walk-way, and that becomes the standard place to walk. You follow it until you find something better, a shortcut. Then you build a new pavement there.

Folksonomies[1] are hot these days, and they go against the rigid a priory classification that has been standard so far. That's another example of a shortcut. Because it's better (easier, faster, more natural, etc.) people are adopting it, and it's becoming a de facto standard. That's the new shortcut, and pavents are being built to facilitate this new route.

[1] simpy (use demo/demo for a demo)

I guess it depends on what you mean...

[stlhawkeye]

I mean, when people violate conventions, I sometimes get annoyed. For example, creating stack variables in C whose names are in all-capital letters, when convention holds that macros look like that.

Perhaps it's useful to discuss what the difference is between a de facto standard and a convention. If there is none, then I'd say conventions evolve through traditions established by whomever pioneered a given technology/idea, and those conventions can and do change over time (Liebniz notation in calculus comes to mind as a mediocre example) as better ideas come up. But usually over a long period of time.

I mean, we had damn near purged the world of programmers who put their opening brace for a new code block on the same line as the conditional statement, and then that Gosling dude from Java went and set us back 20 years.

Re:I guess it depends on what you mean...

[stlhawkeye]

I was kidding, mostly, just needling people who use that brace style.

To answer your question, nothing is strictly wrong with it, it's a matter of preference. I can give you my reasons for disliking it but it's just garbage to justify an opinion I can't otherwise explain.

1. The bracers are not vertically aligned in the same column, thus breaking my the ability to quickly, visually align blocks of related code on-screen. Note that plenty of people find your method more readable. I don't.
2. Few people who code that way will put the start brace to a function in the same place; they tend to start a newline and put the brace on it. Usage tends to be inconsistant, making other people's code more difficult to read.
3. When you start a new block of code without a conditional, where do you put the brace?
4. If you want to test a block of code, you can easily comment-out the conditional if the brace has its own line. If you put it after the conditional, you have to comment that line out and add another brace, then delete it when you're done.

But mostly I like it because that's how I learned to program and I find the shortcomings of the same-column brace style more tolerable than the shortcomings of the old style. I find on-screen space to be a negligable concern, I haven't coded on an 80x25 terminal since 1993, I personally find it less readable, and I've not committed or experienced that particular bug since my first semester of C. Moreover, that bug becomes easily self-apparant with any modern editor that supports good syntax highlighting.

Those are my reasons, but I suspect that, as with most programmers, the real reason I dislike that style is that I didn't learn to code using it, and so it looks "funny" to me. Being a rational person, I've tried to justify my preference with logic, and I think I do a good job of it, but I'm willing to accept that it's just stubborn adherence to how I learned it.

I also find the BSD style ("my way") to be far more common than the K&R-style, which means I more easily read more code that I run into "in the wild". K&R didn't even use their own style consistantly. As I mentioned, they failed to use that style on function definitions.

I like the orthogonality of the braces lining up, it just looks clean and organized to me. However, in Perl, where I cannot omit braces for single-line code blocks after a conditional, I use K&R style for brevity, so I'm guilty of the very inconsistance that I claim to dislike!

Time!

[Skiron]

You only need to look at time 'standards', which stemmed from the railways in the UK (how can you run a 'timetable' if all parts of the country run their own time?' - as an aside, railway timetables are worthless now, as the punctuality of UK trains are soul destorying if you need to use them commuting).

Then look at gun manufacture that introduced 'standards' to make parts that all fit no matter where that part was made.

Now look at the software state. Companies deliberately adopting the 'standard' that every agree on to make it all work, then once in common usage, change it slightly (privately) to break the standard and have their own monopoly.

De Facto Standards

[Philosinfinity]

This article makes several interesting points, however I am stuck on their second example where they discuss "PC Compatible." In this example, they state that PCs share in design from the original IBM PC. As an example it shows how a new PC may have 4GB of memory, but it still uses the 640K of base memory. Then it makes a fairly strong claim. It claims that this became the defacto standard in part because it was better than the standards it replaced. However, this doesn't seem to be true, necessarily or otherwise. The IBM PC became the defacto standard out of popularity more than anything else. One needs to look no further than the battle between VHS and BetaMax. Sure, Beta had better video and audio quality. However, due to cost, simplicity, and marketing, VHS became the standard for magnetic video tapes.

You're using one right now

[ksvh]

The English language itself is an example of a naturally occurring communications standard. Although it is an informal standard, I do not recommend ignoring this one.

Re:Tests

[stankulp]

"Hm, this reminds me of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. That's not changing any time soon, is it?"

Great Britain and Australia have seen their violent crime rates soar since revoking the right of ordinary citizens to own guns.

Over 50 million people were murdered by their own governments during the 20th century, and the first thing these governments did to start their cleansing programs was outlaw guns for ordinary citizens.

So tell me exactly why the Second Amendment makes no sense?

Abe Lincoln and the 4'8" gauge railroads

[garyebickford]

Perhaps the oldest de facto standard still in use is the track width for US railroads (and some, but not all non-US). IIRC it's 4'8", which is: a) not really wide enough; and b) certainly not a nice round number like, for example, five feet.

The history is interesting, and demonstrates the power of an established de facto standard. (I don't recall the source for this, but I think it was a PBS TV show.) When the very first railroad cars were built, they were built by wagon makers, who used the same jigs and fixtures they used for wagons. Wagons had a de facto standard track width of four feet eight inches.

This track width dates back to Roman times. Roman chariots had this track width, because it worked correctly for the horses that they used. So for roughly 2000 years, wagons were generally made that size.

As railroads began to expand, they used a variety of gauges up to seven or eight feet. (The famed Orient Express had a seven foot gauge, IIRC.) Some early railroads used different gauges as a competitive measure, to prevent competitors from running trains on their track and requiring customers to change trains, often several times within a short trip.

Abraham Lincoln was President when the first transcontinental railroad was to be built, which would require that the different companies involved would have to use the same gauge. He actively questioned the "odd" 4'8" gauge, and after some discussion, signed a Presidential edict that all railroads henceforth must have a gauge of five feet. The railroads proceeded to totally ignore this law, and built everything in 4'8" gauge, thus demonstrating the power of de facto standards. So today, we (mostly don't) ride in railroad cars whose dimensions are descended directly from the width of a Roman horse's behind.