The Pitfalls and Perks of Adopting a New Standard

Monta writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about the pros and cons of 'adopting a standard before it becomes one'. From the article: "Whether a standard will succeed and be widely adopted is ambiguous at first, regardless of who endorses it -- a major player or a fringe element. So if most people don't like to welcome the new guy, why would they put all their eggs in a standards basket when that basket might not exist tomorrow?"

Comments

Yeah...

[GillBates0]

Whether a standard will succeed and be widely adopted is ambiguous at first, regardless of who endorses it -- a major player or a fringe element

...we really need a standard way of adopting a new standard.

Re:Yeah...

[AuMatar]

You forgot a step.

1.5) Ignore it while calling yourself "the industry standard".

Sticking to an old standard

[Anonymous Coward]

So if most people don't like to welcome the new guy

I, for one, welcome the new guy!

Sometimes...

[Stanistani]

Getting a product to market with a new technology can advance the adoption of a standard.

Chicken, meet egg.

Of course it's a gamble...
but that's one way to make the big money.

Examples

[Bogtha]

For one example of pitfalls and perks, consider stylesheets. Netscape threw their weight behind JSSS, Internet Explorer threw their weight behind CSS. CSS got taken up by the W3C, JSSS got chucked. Internet Explorer 3 was first with CSS support, Netscape 3 had none, and Netscape 4's CSS support was an abysmal wrapper around JSSS.

Another example is XSLT; Microsoft implemented a draft version, and ended up with support that was incompatible with the final specification and later versions of their own browser.

Of course, who was first doesn't matter in the long run. What matters is an ongoing commitment to conformance - being first with partial support means nothing if you do as Microsoft did with CSS and forget to implement the rest for years.

The great thing about standards

[Tribbin]

Stolen quote: The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Once in a while, it works

[Webmoth]

One well-adopted "standard" (which isn't a standard at all) is ID3 (and its successor, ID3V2), the standard for tagging files with metadata.

The interesting thing here is that it is as standard proposed and written in the spirit of Open Source -- its development is moderated by a core group of loosely-knit volunteers, and anyone can contribute to the discussion.

It has been adopted by practically every developer -- commercial, open source, Joe-in-Basement, etc. -- of multimedia software, even Microsoft.

No standards body (IEEE, IETF, ISO, NIST, W3C, IANA, etc.) has accepted it as a standard; to my knowledge it has never been submitted to any organization as a proposed standard.

By community involvement and acceptance, it has become a de facto standard, and for the most part everyone plays by the rules.