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.

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.

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!

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...

[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]
}

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: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

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.

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...