Following standards
Following standards
- Subject: Following standards
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 10:50:43 +0100
John Gnaegy <email@hidden> wrote:
I don't see a reason to take any of this offline.
This is the right way. Often, asking the naive question, 'Why is it
like this and not like that?' brings up conceptual issues. Both the
person posing the question and those who throw light on the answer
may find there is much to learn in exploring it.
The posts up to the June ICC meeting were an attempt, but clearly I
did not write them well enough. So this time I will use ordinary
metaphor and not technical jargon. I always liked Michael Faraday's
'Chemical History of a Candle', the Christmas lectures he gave. Even
I can understand them, because he doesn't present issues more complex
than they have to be.
Faraday was self-taught, like most of us on this List. He lived in an
age when men worked with machines, and where physics and observation
were the basis of popular science. It is harder in the digital age,
not least because the digital society depends deeply on standards.
In the industrial age companies set their own standards, for
instance, in the graphic arts there was no shared definition of the
point and pica (only PostScript accomplished that) just as in other
walks of life men and women used different measuring systems, too.
This cannot work in the digital age because products from different
companies must inter-connect.
If they do not do so, the cost of support rises. Not only for the
company which offers a non-standard product, but equally for other
companies into whose workflows the non-standard product feeds. One
consequence is that we have such user lists as this as a combined
workflow debugging and public help desk. Another consequence is that
companies are returning to the business model of the industrial age:
They are defining their own terminology, defining their own standards
and defining themselves as end-to-end solutions providers.
This is a managerial concept, and it is no doubt a profitable one.
Because the customer becomes dependent on the end-to-end service
provider for an interpretation of the standards, of the service
provider's implementation of the standards, and of other companies'
interpretations. This is the media academy model which is the current
iteration in the open systems world of the OEM model used in the days
of Color Electronic Publishing Systems where third party hardware was
integrated into closed systems.
Of course, we cannot for all time live off freeware support and
evangelizing, but I would hope that there is still scope for
discussing whether or not key industry players follow standards,
because in the world of the media academies just as in the
advertising-financed magazine pages, interests other than getting it
right may play a part.