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

Tests

[BWJones]

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".

Re:Tests

[Frater 219]

I'm going to take that subject line in a completely different direction. The difference between an informal "standard" and a formal one is that conformance to a formal standard can be tested.

Indeed, that's what the word "standard" meant of old. A standard is a pole, a stick -- such as a flagpole, hence the term "standard-bearer". However, more usefully, a standard is also a measuring-stick. (Another word for a well-sized stick is canon, which gives us the word canonical, meaning correct or orthodox, as well as cane, a walking-stick.) The purpose of a measuring-stick is to see if someone or something measures up -- if it is standards-compliant. Standards equals testing.

A real IT standard spells out required behaviors of the implementation. In a standards-compliant C compiler, the function printf accepts certain formatting codes, and generates specified formatting therefrom. A C compiler which (say) inserts extra decimal places when formatting a floating-point number is not just wrong, but provably wrong. You can write a test suite based on the C99 standard that enumerates every possible printf formatting code, and tests that the implementation does the right thing.

A standard can also spell out what is at fault in a failure. The DNS standards spell out the consequences of lame delegation. The SMTP email standards spell out responsibility for message delivery -- if your mail server accepts a message from a sending system, it is required to deliver it or transmit a bounce message. If you reject the message, it is up to the sending system to transmit the bounce. If the sender complains that their mail was not received and they got no bounce message, an inspection of the server logs can show which system is at fault by being out of compliance with the standard. Again, testing is of the essence here: one system is measuring up; the other is not.

An informal "standard" is an invitation to arguments over what is "acceptable" behavior. A formal standard that spells out exactly what is to be sent over the wire (or recorded in the file, or accepted in source code) can still be a source of debate, but at least the participants can accept that there can be right and wrong answers.

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?

Re:Tests

[johnnyb]

You forget the point of the second amendment -- it is to keep for the citizens the power to overthrow their government should it become corrupt.

In most totalitarian regimes, before they took away the rights, first they took away the guns. The purpose of the second amendment is to keep someone from doing that.

Re:Tests

[mlyle]

Standard n.
A flag, banner, or ensign, especially:
The ensign of a chief of state, nation, or city.

A long, tapering flag bearing heraldic devices distinctive of a person or corporation.

An emblem or flag of an army, raised on a pole to indicate the rallying point in battle.

The colors of a mounted or motorized military unit.

vs.

Indeed, that's what the word "standard" meant of old. A standard is a pole, a stick -- such as a flagpole, hence the term "standard-bearer".

So you're saying a flagpole is called a standard bearer because it.. bears a stick, rather than bearing a flag?

My OED is upstairs, but according to NOAD it's a shortening of Old French estendart, from estendre 'extend'.

Re:Tests

[palndrumm]

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.)

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

[ed.han]

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

Re:Formally informal

[ergo98]

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.

Re:Formally informal

[Tim C]

Of course, if you ask Microsoft, it's all "the industry standard".

Which it is - it's a standard that's used in the industry. That's de facto standard rather than official standard, of course, but standard nonetheless.

Re:Formally informal

[zippthorne]

speaking of which.. is there a format for animated files? things with a few lines and not much else? On a project i'm working on uses a lot of low-color animated graphs. It seems really wasteful to encode as bitmap,(so we're generating the animations on-the-fly) but mpeg is definately not appropriate for such things: too many artifacts. Is there an "animated-postscript" format?

Re:Formally informal

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Formally informal

[jwinter1]

Animated gif? Flash, maybe?

SVG might be your best bet, though.

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.

Re:Formally informal

[Anonymous Coward]

Smile :)

I mean SMIL
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

Well, do you want to be rich or right?

[winkydink]

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.

Remember ...

[foobsr]

... our whole life is full of informal standards, to name three:

• language
• uniforms ... Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself!
• Slashdot Hive Mind

CC.

P.S.: An excellent article!

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.

True standards qualify both ways

[r00t]

Few use the ISO network protocol. -> not standard
Microsoft Word *.doc is not open. -> not standard
HTTP is open and common. -> true standard

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[pilgrim23]

BSOD -Ultimate standard

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[brontus3927]

openness has nothign to do with standards, de facto or de jure. DVD CSS isn't open, but it's a standard. After all EVERY video DVD is encrypted with CSS.

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

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[superpulpsicle]

Hard to classify HTTP as a standard. It's more of a protocol. Even html has 8 million different syntaxes. Some suits Netscape, some IE etc.

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[HiThere]

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.

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[Infernal Device]

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.

Industry standard techniques

[bonch]

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...

Re:Industry standard techniques

[EggyToast]

I'm not sure if it was the rhetoric major or what, but my professors always made the distinction that some program or protocol was "an industry standard" rather than "the etc."

It makes sense, really -- different people in the industry use different things. Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, LaTeX -- they're all industry standards because there are groups of people out in the industry using them. For all the complaints about Word being standard, well, RTF is an industry standard as well and is used by a great many people in industry.

I have found that those standards tend to change depending on the needs of the company and the kind of work they're doing (and whether they even have an R&D staff). There's plenty of companies still using PageMaker, which WAS a standard, but InDesign has by far supplanted PageMaker as a standard. There's still those publishers out there using PageMaker, though, because they're afraid to change or aren't aware of the similarities/differences in other programs.

As far as I'm concerned, "Industry Standard" simply means "used by a non-insignificant portion of businesses/organizations."

That's different, though, from something that is standardized, like 508 compliancy or redbook encoding on commercial audio CDs, and I think that's where the disconnects in arguments above stem from. TFA goes on about de facto standards when they're simply formats that are used by a majority in an industry. From wikipedia:

De facto is a Latin expression that means "in fact" or "in practice". It is commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning "by law") when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as created or developed without or against a regulation. "De facto" is a qualifier which implies that what is being described is not quite universally accepted; otherwise, the idea (eg a standard) would usually be described without the term.

Any common experience that is understood as a de facto standard or experience may be accepted but that doesn't mean it's understood. My citation of 508 compliancy above is a good example -- it's well understood and documented AND it explains why it should be used. It's not a standard because of majority use, but because it's outlined, and people can choose to use it for a specific purpose. It's a much stronger standard for that, as it can be checked against for clarity.

A de facto standard like .wmv isn't, because although it's accepted as a suitable video file, that's only because people use it without really knowing better. It's closed, so there's no reference for programmers to check their code and usage against outside of the documents supplied by Microsoft. Same with .doc files. So yeah, it's a standard, and people in businesses use it, but generally the arguments for using it are "it's easy" and "i don't need to look up alternates cos my computer can do it right now." While those are reasons used commonly by professionals, it doesn't speak at all towards the flexibility nor durability of said standard.

good standards are not easy

[MPHellwig]

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.

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)

De Facto Whipping Boys

[Nom du Keyboard]

1960
IBM

1970
IBM

1980
IBM

1990
Microsoft

2000
Microsoft

2003
SCO

It's de facto when it requires no further explination.

Acceptance

[codesurfer]

I've found that a 'standard' is often something that is found to be merely acceptable by the majority, not specifically desired or due to it's excellence. Standards are commonly just that...the minimal acceptable process/result.

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...

[m50d]

Why is it a problem? It saves space, increasing readability, and avoids this horrible bug:
for(int i=0;i<10;i++);
{
[loop body]
}

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!

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

[AKAImBatman]

It saves space

Whitespace if your friend. If your code is too dense it actually becomes harder for the next guy to figure out. If you find yourself with massive code files that require you to make the code denser so that you don't get lost, then you need to check your design. Java encourages the use of large numbers of classes and packages for a reason.

increasing readability

When the braces line up, readability increases as the eye will naturally follow the brace down to its partner. Moving the brace on the same line produces asymmetric code that is rather unnatural for humans to read.

In addition, having the braces on separate lines helps if your formatting ever gets screwed up. It becomes much easier to slam the whole chunk of text to the left, then indent section by section. Just line highlight the inner-most braces and tab. Chose the next inner-most and repeat. Within a few seconds the entire chunk of text will be properly formatted.

avoids this horrible bug

That is a rather annoying bug. However, I have to say that I've lost far more time trying to read the same-line brace code (especially when idiots mix tab and space indents) than I have ever lost to the semicolon typo. I did the semi-colon two or three times, then I learned.

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

[FTL]

Or you could just use Python, which enforces readability and avoids the entire concept of silly bugs like that in the process.

Until someone types a tab instead of spaces, and the application goes AWOL.

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

[anthony_dipierro]

Dare I ask what the point of putting it on a new line is? Seems like a waste of space to me. I'm especially annoyed by people who use:
}
else
{
when they could get along perfectly fine with:
} else {
Why waste all that space?

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

[anthony_dipierro]

Whitespace if your friend.

Not in excess, it isn't.

If your code is too dense it actually becomes harder for the next guy to figure out.

And if it isn't dense enough, it also becomes harder.

When the braces line up, readability increases as the eye will naturally follow the brace down to its partner.

I don't see the advantage here. Your eye is going to see the indentation and naturally follow the indentation down to where the indentation stops. You don't need a brace to do that.

Moving the brace on the same line produces asymmetric code that is rather unnatural for humans to read.

It's not any more or less natural to put the brace on the other line. You're just not used to it. If you were, you'd find just the opposite.

In addition, having the braces on separate lines helps if your formatting ever gets screwed up.

There are plenty of programs out there that will reformat your text for you in this (extremely rare) situation.

However, I have to say that I've lost far more time trying to read the same-line brace code (especially when idiots mix tab and space indents)

Is it so hard to change your tab spacing to match that of the "idiot"? Alternatively, you could go ahead and run indent or some similar program. Neither take very much time.

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

[Chemisor]

> With tabs, we can all set our editors to use the
> amount of visual space that is most pleasing to us.

Oh, the horror! Thou shalt not mess with the holy 8-space tabs! It's heresy!

I'm beginning to wonder if...

[IronChefMorimoto]

...there's a naturally occurring standard at Slashdot that demands that at least one story like this gets posted a day.

Meanwhile, my story submission about monkeys that play cards on the Internet gets rejected. F*ckers.

IronChefMorimoto

Re:I'm beginning to wonder if...

[SmokeHalo]

primatepoker.com

Only design them when you really need them

[billstewart]

If there's a standard around that does what you need to do, it's probably worth using it, at least if it's usable. There's a lot of application design these days that's too minor for a standards committee to bother with, and it's usually more important to get creative and interesting stuff out there than to talk people into thinking your work is going to be sufficiently creative and interesting that they should form a standards committee for stuff like yours.

However, you should still do so openly - build interfaces that people can use, and document them so people can figure out how to use them, and if you're lucky, people will use them for things you've never thought of, so try not to prevent that.

Standards Orgs?

[Unordained]

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.

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) ... 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.)

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.)

Re:Standards Orgs?

[rainmayun]

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.

Analysis of the TFA

[Flywheels of Fire]

Analysis of the TFA:

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.

Re:Analysis of the TFA

[Bonhamme Richard]

Not true. Even Microsoft makes its products backward compatible. (One might say they make their products backwards, but that is another story).

...

I thought that was the author's point. It was saying that MS word is a standard, and if you write a word-type program that isn't compatable, you're screwed. When MS releases a new MS word, there is a short time when ONLY other MS products are compatable with it. So every time MS updates word everyone else has to go back and change stuff, giving MS an advantage.

Software patents are evil. Full stop. It has nothing to do with standards.

Does this mean that copywrite laws are evil too? I can just quote entire Washington Post articles without giving credit? Its the same basic idea. Patents laws may be written poorly, but I wonder what you would say if it was all of your code being stolen... or what Dan Brown would say if I tried to reproduce "The Da Vinci Code" w/o his permission....

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.

open interfaces

[vijayiyer]

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.

Standards -- "Best Practices"

[MrBoring]

This reminds me of the term "Best Practices". Usually I rather hate the term because typically stuff labeled as such receives little to no public scrutiny. I'm left wondering, how does one know they really are "the best", and who is the author to say they are "the best."

In sciences like chemistry or physics, or other disciplines, knowledgeable people peer-review ideas before they get published, or widely at least. Those ideas are more measurable or provable, and seem to amount to more than a heap of words without any mathematical basis. The same is mostly not true in computing.

Instead, I think what defines standards have little to do with technical merit, and much more to with money. If you want to know what's a standard, look towards how much money companies have spent either creating, promoting or using it.
If the idea is bad enough, it'll probably be financed by someone.

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.

Re:De Facto Standards

[Philosinfinity]

Yeah, that is exactly what I was getting at. Specifically, from the article:

First, though, to dispel a few myths: Not all de facto standards are the same. Some of them are really good. Some are really bad. Not every de facto standard represents the best possible technical decisions; not every de facto standard represents the tyranny of a proprietary despot dribbling out just enough crumbs of documentation to keep the peasants from revolting. De facto standards can be temporary kluges, or carefully considered and planned designs; they can reflect an individual's vision or a committee's indecision. In short, it is dangerous to treat them as interchangeable.

This is a very important statement. It builds a framework to relate the usage of de facto standards to Kuhn's characterization of science in The Structure of Scientiffic Revolution. In this case, we find that the standard exists merely for the reasons we both outlined (e.g. gross popularity or cost factors) and not necessarily because of its function. This flies in the face of Kuhn, though. What it does, though, is show that while computer science is very science like, there are still major roots of business that factor into its evolution and development.

better question...

[briancnorton]

What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?

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.

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.

think about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The great thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from.

Driving on the Right Side

[mlmitton]

It may be worth noting that in the U.S., car drivers were driving on the right side of the road well before the government required they do so.

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.

Re:Driving on the Right Side

[Anonymous Coward]

Take away the private interests, and people will naturally organize themselves to one format or another

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.

Standard == Flag To Rally 'Round

[rewinn]

Literally or figuratively, a "standard" is a flag that the troops rally around as we head into battle.

If we're lucky, we rally 'round because the standard inspires us and represents something we love.

If we're unlucky, we rally 'round because the Commissars are standing behind us with sidearms ... literally or figuratively.

Most important article for /. in days

[TodPunk]

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...

Re:Natural?

[TeknoHog]

"things like C, e, pi, alpha"

I sincerely hope you mean c, not the language C.

I read this post earlier

[UrgleHoth]

On OSNews

Copied verbatim. Nice. What do we call dupes from other sites without credit? Oh, yeah, plagiarism

Aye fink day FACTO standadz R stoopit

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

So til dey pubLish a off,ishul standad deesyded bai cummiti 4 inglish mai ritin wil luk laik dis

Re:Natural?

[TeknoHog]

c is not a standard constant. The speed of light can change depending on the medium through which it travels.

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.

Standard Gauge

[N3Bruce]

To paraphrase the old joke, the Solid Rocket Boosters on the Space Shuttle are limited to the diameter they are because of the finite diameter of the rail tunnels between the Morton-Thiokol plant in Nevada and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The railcars which carry the SRB segments are all on carriages which have trucks with the wheels exactly 55 inches apart, which is known as Standard Gauge in railroad lingo.

Why was this figure chosen?

Early railcars derived their design from mining cars which rode on rails inside mines before the locomotive was invented. For convenience, the railroads adopted their standard gauge very close to this common pre-railroad standard.

Why were the carts made with this width between the wheels?

The early mining carts were adapted from cargo wagons which travelled on the old Roman roads in Europe, which had developed deep ruts over the centuries. The distance between the wheels was selected so the wheels rode in the center of these ruts to avoid breaking an axle frequently?

Why did the Roman roads have their ruts at this distance from each other?

The distance between the center of the ruts on the old Roman roads was a function of the distance between the wheels of the old Roman Charriots.

Why did the Romans select the wheel spacing they did?

The old Roman charriots were designed so that a pair of horses could pull them. The track had to be wide enough to accomodate the hind quarters of two horses.

So there you have it, the design of the Space Shuttle is constrained by a couple of horses' asses!

Re:Standard Gauge

[raxxy]

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

Standards are about interoperability

[dr_pump95]

A "standard" exists so that independently developed entities can work together. Nuts and bolts, network protocols, whatever. Standards succeed when people really need interoperability, and the standard provides this in a convenient manner. X400 (ISO email) didn't succeed because SMTP was sufficient and was more convenient. X500 (ISO directory) didn't succeed because people didn't need it badly enough to spend the money on implementation. LDAP (dumbed-down X500 over TCP/IP) was more successful because it was cheaper and more convenient. Microsoft Word documents are a standard in the sense that people use them as a way to exchange formatted information that everyone can read (as long as they have the right version of Word ...). It works because most people already have compatible versions of Microsoft Word. Convenience again!

de facto standard != natural standard

[CAIMLAS]

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).

Housebricks

[ajs318]

Housebricks are pretty much the same size wherever you go, even in old buildings which predate the standard housebrick (215 x 102.5 x 65). Why? Because a housebrick is The Right Size For The Job: not too big to be manipulated with one hand, not so small that you need more of them per building.

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.