RE: Development standards for the World -- MIDRANGE-L

midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>   2. Development standards for the World (Shields, Ken)
>
>    I've been in the IT industry for about forty years, and for the same 
> period of time, many segments of the industry
>    have talked ad infinitum, about industry standards.
>    With the exception possibly of manufacturing methods, the software side of 
> things has had a very broad range of 
>    'Standards', which each and every interest tries to foist on the world
>    - IBM standards
>    - EDI standards
>    - Sun Microsystems
>    ................................and the list goes on.
>    My conclusion is, there will never be any universal standards in IT, 
> because of the proprietary nature of the business,
>    and also because, the big boys on the block quite regularly create the 
> standards.

Ken:

At first, I didn't quite catch your wording. But now I see that you effectively 
paraphrased what I said and that you agree with me.

If we're talking individual companies such as IBM and Sun from your list, we'll 
have trouble interoperating world-wide. SNA, token-ring, OS/2, maybe even 
EBCDIC... while standard within IBM, these certainly couldn't be considered as 
lasting in a world-wide sense because they were indeed controlled by a single 
company even though some others try to support them too. We know those well 
enough also to know that 'standards' from a single vendor can cause long-term 
trouble regardless of short-term benefits.

Java perhaps will escape from Sun and have a chance. The next couple years will 
tell that tale. It's a great example of the problem of single-vendor 
'standards'.

EDI, well, there _are_ some standards beyond the control of specific vendors, 
but I haven't been involved with EDI in a 'standard' sense for quite a few 
years, so I don't know the current state. But I know that there have been 
'standard' requirements for transmitting to the federal government in various 
Departments. Of course, I also recall that the 'standards' I had to work with 
were very representative of 'federal' standards of _any_ kind.

As for world-wide interoperability, standards bodies have made quite a bit of 
progress. In many cases, they've helped drag OS/400 along. FTP, SMTP, telnet, 
LPR/LPD, SNMP, these and others have some standards that work. And the web is 
related there.

There can be no doubt that there are specific items such as mentioned by Joe 
where a browser-specific feature is advanced beyond all alternatives. This type 
of feature can provide valuable utility where appropriate. Hopefully, such 
features will be recognized as being widely worthwhile and be incorporated into 
overall standards.

But to me, those are obviously infrequent. There are extremely few sites that I 
am unable to access successfully with Firefox (as long as I keep my JVM at a 
current level). I am currently not aware of any such sites though I have run 
across them. Maybe I just don't have the right needs.

I often don't have a clear trust of such sites. Most often it seems that they 
rush a new fancy feature out just so they can appear to be in the lead for 
technology; not for real value to the site visitor, but just for company ego. 
If that's how they spend the money I give them as a customer, perhaps it's not 
a company I should do business with. At times, I thought this was one factor in 
the dot-com bubble rise and subsequent burst.

So, yes, a lot of 'standards' have been foisted on the world by particular 
companies and it's often led to trouble. It seems to me that this is a proper 
characterization of the thread -- browser-specific features introduced by a 
single company, Microsoft, outside of and regardless of any independent 
standards body.

There has recently been evidence that Microsoft has finally decided to catch up 
with a lot of standards. Although they'd previously seemed to be ignoring newer 
ones, they might actually release Internet Explorer 7 and give to developers 
numerous items that had been requested and griped about for years. This likely 
won't do much for Mac users, but Apple's Safari will probably be a better 
browser there anyway. Linux... well, who knows?

But by dragging its feet, Microsoft has actually retarded the progress of the 
web experience and probably damaged the credibility of groups such as W3C...

...Clearly to me an example of a company trying to 'foist on the world' its own 
version of the concept of 'standards'.

See:
  http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5620988.html

...for some relatively current background.

Tom Liotta

-- 
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788 x313
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com



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