Standard for what, standards for why, standards for everyone...
So, I wrote an email to a list, asking them to review and (hopefully!) sign the Hague Declaration:
http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en
In summary the Hague Declaration calls for there to be digital standards, open to all, and that governments are mandated to use them.
Among various responses (most, thankfully, in favour) was someone who asked
"Standard for what?"
Having gone to the trouble of answering at some length, it seems sensible to reproduce the response, suitable edited to make sense out of the email context (insofar as that is possible!).
So my response to the question "Standard for what?"
Standards for everything that matters.
A physical example: in the UK we have a standard for electrical plugs and sockets and for the supply. This means that I can buy a lamp or a fridge and be sure it will be able to plug into my home electrical socket and it just work and I don't risk death by using it.
It is my choice to have switched sockets or unswitched. The plug can be black or white or chrome (hopefully not chrome...); it can be rubberised and curvy or hard plastic and square. The sockets can be sunk into the wall or surface mounted or in trunking and also any colour/material (mine are black nickel, which is nice without being too much, but I digress...). It doesn't matter i.e. these factors are not part of the standard, because what matters is that the socket has 3 specifically sized rectangular pins, positioned just so, with the right pin "live" and fused appropriately, the left pin neutral and the top pin earth. The socket needs to have the equivalent sized and placed holes and wired appropriately and if switched the switch needs to meet certain specifications. The UK electrical supply is legally required to be 50Hz AC at 230V +/- 10%.
That's it. That's the bits that need to be standardised. And not only are supply and sockets and plugs standardised but mandated to be so. This means I can buy my sockets from whomever made by whomever and my plugs are sourced by the manufacturers of my electrical equipment from whomever. Bring it all together with my power supply from yet another supplier and it all works fine.
If you travel from the US or Europe to the UK you need an adapter (in software terms a translator. And your translator might be big and expensive, if for example, you moved from the US to here and brought your white goods with you. I have a US-market breadmaker which needs 700W at 110v; that needs a significant transformer, not just a simple shape-shift. But in the end home electrical needs are simple and the differences between the different plug and supply standards well documented and well understood, because all are standardised in their home nation. Now consider a power adapter that works for all domestic appliances anywhere in the world e.g. a 1.2kW vacuum cleaner from the UK in France, Switzerland, the US and Australia, or one from the US everywhere else, etc.; you would need a transformer that can step up or down, plus 5 or 6 plug adapters, plus maybe several power cables. Just for the simple problem of switching power supplies between two voltages and a few different shape plugs/sockets... Imagine doing that for undocumented, unstandardised binary data formats.
So the short answer to the question: standards for the digital plugs and sockets and standards for the digital power supply. The plugs and sockets are the APIs and the protocols; lots of that is already sorted (think http for the web, TCP/IP for the networking, etc.). The digital power supply is the information that flows, the stuff that is important in this information age we are entering. It is there we are short of standards. I don't want to dictate to anyone what software they should use. I do think I should be able to demand that they provide information in a standardised format and this not be an issue because they don't a specific software package. Where there are no available standards we have to be pragmatic initially, but we must move towards a position where there are standards for those interchanges i.e. develop them either from existing formats or by starting clean.
It's not about control or restrictions, it's about real choice. You get to choose which applications you use and do so without concerns about operating systems or the applications being used by others, because the information will flow as a standard all can read without issue or artificial restriction.
This is particularly an issue for governments and the file formats they use to exchange and provide information, which is where we started from with the Hague Declaration. So if you haven't already, go read it and hopefully sign it!
Posted at 10:42AM May 16, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards |