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wayward vagabond from homestuck: we should improve technology somewhat. well dweller: xkcd 927 "standards"
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Found it on Mastodon, I don't know if it's the original source. The XKCD does have a good point, of course. But I mean, if we'd all think like that, no good standards would ever develop, so people shouln't cite it as a fundamental truth everywhere and avoid all meaningful discussion.
Yeah it is worth looking into why certain new "standards" get adoped and others don't.
Standards don't ever get designed just to be the new universal standard, right? There's gotta be some kind of improvement in mind, whether iterating on previous designs or otherwise. I'd say that in many cases the improvement is the focus for the developer, not the delusion of creating the next big "standard".
It's better for "standards" to develop naturally as happens in FOSS rather than for them to be imposed by authorities that will resist changing them once they become outdated, or companies that don't care either way and will follow the profit of least resistance.
Plenty of standards are created with the express purpose of being a standard and selling the license for that standard to large companies. USB, HDMI, BlueRay, CD, Bluetooth, etc. all of these are standards designed as standards.
Which is why they often suck, no? Took years for USB to really find its footing, and now with all the EU legislation setting USB-C I feel like it's gonna become frustratingly outdated eventually.