Naturally Occurring Standards

An anonymous reader writes "The phrase 'de facto standard' can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?"

Formally informal

[AKAImBatman]

In my experience, things become an informal standard because either someone with a lot of influence says it should be (e.g. Microsoft) or the technology just makes a lot of sense and hits the market at the right time (e.g. Java).

Just remember: Microsoft Office is an informal standard, as is Microsoft Windows. Of course, if you ask Microsoft, it's all "the industry standard".

(Which reminds me of an amusing story. My company had a third party do a web video for us at one point. The third party then asked us what format we wanted it in. I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard. We then got back a WMV file with a note about Windows Media being "the industry standard". Apparently the only reason they asked was that they wanted to know if we wanted the file coded as VBR or not.)

Standard...

[xtracto]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=standard Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence.

What makes [or should make] something standard is the wide acceptance from the population. And after all, that is a standard. As an example (trying not to flamebait) Microsoft could try to standaraize his .DOC format, but if people wont use it, it wont be a standard (it wont matter if it is an ISO-XXXX standard). Of course, now, .DOC is a kind of document standard.

True standards qualify both ways

[r00t]

Few use the ISO network protocol. -> not standard
Microsoft Word *.doc is not open. -> not standard
HTTP is open and common. -> true standard

Analogy: urban architects, folksonomy

[otisg]

Good urban architects don't impose pavements on people. They let people walk freely and observe the walking routes and patterns. Then they put down the walk-way, and that becomes the standard place to walk. You follow it until you find something better, a shortcut. Then you build a new pavement there.

Folksonomies[1] are hot these days, and they go against the rigid a priory classification that has been standard so far. That's another example of a shortcut. Because it's better (easier, faster, more natural, etc.) people are adopting it, and it's becoming a de facto standard. That's the new shortcut, and pavents are being built to facilitate this new route.

[1] simpy [simpy.com] (use demo/demo for a demo)

Acceptance

[codesurfer]

I've found that a 'standard' is often something that is found to be merely acceptable by the majority, not specifically desired or due to it's excellence. Standards are commonly just that...the minimal acceptable process/result.

I guess it depends on what you mean...

[stlhawkeye]

I mean, when people violate conventions, I sometimes get annoyed. For example, creating stack variables in C whose names are in all-capital letters, when convention holds that macros look like that.

Perhaps it's useful to discuss what the difference is between a de facto standard and a convention. If there is none, then I'd say conventions evolve through traditions established by whomever pioneered a given technology/idea, and those conventions can and do change over time (Liebniz notation in calculus comes to mind as a mediocre example) as better ideas come up. But usually over a long period of time.

I mean, we had damn near purged the world of programmers who put their opening brace for a new code block on the same line as the conditional statement, and then that Gosling dude from Java went and set us back 20 years.

Only design them when you really need them

[billstewart]

If there's a standard around that does what you need to do, it's probably worth using it, at least if it's usable. There's a lot of application design these days that's too minor for a standards committee to bother with, and it's usually more important to get creative and interesting stuff out there than to talk people into thinking your work is going to be sufficiently creative and interesting that they should form a standards committee for stuff like yours.

However, you should still do so openly - build interfaces that people can use, and document them so people can figure out how to use them, and if you're lucky, people will use them for things you've never thought of, so try not to prevent that.

Time!

[Skiron]

You only need to look at time 'standards', which stemmed from the railways in the UK (how can you run a 'timetable' if all parts of the country run their own time?' - as an aside, railway timetables are worthless now, as the punctuality of UK trains are soul destorying if you need to use them commuting).

Then look at gun manufacture that introduced 'standards' to make parts that all fit no matter where that part was made.

Now look at the software state. Companies deliberately adopting the 'standard' that every agree on to make it all work, then once in common usage, change it slightly (privately) to break the standard and have their own monopoly.

Standards -- "Best Practices"

[MrBoring]

This reminds me of the term "Best Practices". Usually I rather hate the term because typically stuff labeled as such receives little to no public scrutiny. I'm left wondering, how does one know they really are "the best", and who is the author to say they are "the best."

In sciences like chemistry or physics, or other disciplines, knowledgeable people peer-review ideas before they get published, or widely at least. Those ideas are more measurable or provable, and seem to amount to more than a heap of words without any mathematical basis. The same is mostly not true in computing.

Instead, I think what defines standards have little to do with technical merit, and much more to with money. If you want to know what's a standard, look towards how much money companies have spent either creating, promoting or using it.
If the idea is bad enough, it'll probably be financed by someone.

De Facto Standards

[Philosinfinity]

This article makes several interesting points, however I am stuck on their second example where they discuss "PC Compatible." In this example, they state that PCs share in design from the original IBM PC. As an example it shows how a new PC may have 4GB of memory, but it still uses the 640K of base memory. Then it makes a fairly strong claim. It claims that this became the defacto standard in part because it was better than the standards it replaced. However, this doesn't seem to be true, necessarily or otherwise. The IBM PC became the defacto standard out of popularity more than anything else. One needs to look no further than the battle between VHS and BetaMax. Sure, Beta had better video and audio quality. However, due to cost, simplicity, and marketing, VHS became the standard for magnetic video tapes.

You're using one right now

[ksvh]

The English language itself is an example of a naturally occurring communications standard. Although it is an informal standard, I do not recommend ignoring this one.

Re:Formally informal

[Tim C]

Of course, if you ask Microsoft, it's all "the industry standard".

Which it is - it's a standard that's used in the industry. That's de facto standard rather than official standard, of course, but standard nonetheless.

Re:I guess it depends on what you mean...

[stlhawkeye]

I was kidding, mostly, just needling people who use that brace style.

To answer your question, nothing is strictly wrong with it, it's a matter of preference. I can give you my reasons for disliking it but it's just garbage to justify an opinion I can't otherwise explain.

1. The bracers are not vertically aligned in the same column, thus breaking my the ability to quickly, visually align blocks of related code on-screen. Note that plenty of people find your method more readable. I don't.
2. Few people who code that way will put the start brace to a function in the same place; they tend to start a newline and put the brace on it. Usage tends to be inconsistant, making other people's code more difficult to read.
3. When you start a new block of code without a conditional, where do you put the brace?
4. If you want to test a block of code, you can easily comment-out the conditional if the brace has its own line. If you put it after the conditional, you have to comment that line out and add another brace, then delete it when you're done.

But mostly I like it because that's how I learned to program and I find the shortcomings of the same-column brace style more tolerable than the shortcomings of the old style. I find on-screen space to be a negligable concern, I haven't coded on an 80x25 terminal since 1993, I personally find it less readable, and I've not committed or experienced that particular bug since my first semester of C. Moreover, that bug becomes easily self-apparant with any modern editor that supports good syntax highlighting.

Those are my reasons, but I suspect that, as with most programmers, the real reason I dislike that style is that I didn't learn to code using it, and so it looks "funny" to me. Being a rational person, I've tried to justify my preference with logic, and I think I do a good job of it, but I'm willing to accept that it's just stubborn adherence to how I learned it.

I also find the BSD style ("my way") to be far more common than the K&R-style, which means I more easily read more code that I run into "in the wild". K&R didn't even use their own style consistantly. As I mentioned, they failed to use that style on function definitions.

I like the orthogonality of the braces lining up, it just looks clean and organized to me. However, in Perl, where I cannot omit braces for single-line code blocks after a conditional, I use K&R style for brevity, so I'm guilty of the very inconsistance that I claim to dislike!

Re:I guess it depends on what you mean...

[AKAImBatman]

It saves space

Whitespace if your friend. If your code is too dense it actually becomes harder for the next guy to figure out. If you find yourself with massive code files that require you to make the code denser so that you don't get lost, then you need to check your design. Java encourages the use of large numbers of classes and packages for a reason.

increasing readability

When the braces line up, readability increases as the eye will naturally follow the brace down to its partner. Moving the brace on the same line produces asymmetric code that is rather unnatural for humans to read.

In addition, having the braces on separate lines helps if your formatting ever gets screwed up. It becomes much easier to slam the whole chunk of text to the left, then indent section by section. Just line highlight the inner-most braces and tab. Chose the next inner-most and repeat. Within a few seconds the entire chunk of text will be properly formatted.

avoids this horrible bug

That is a rather annoying bug. However, I have to say that I've lost far more time trying to read the same-line brace code (especially when idiots mix tab and space indents) than I have ever lost to the semicolon typo. I did the semi-colon two or three times, then I learned.

Re:Formally informal

[zippthorne]

speaking of which.. is there a format for animated files? things with a few lines and not much else? On a project i'm working on uses a lot of low-color animated graphs. It seems really wasteful to encode as bitmap,(so we're generating the animations on-the-fly) but mpeg is definately not appropriate for such things: too many artifacts. Is there an "animated-postscript" format?

Re:Tests

[stankulp]

"Hm, this reminds me of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. That's not changing any time soon, is it?"

Great Britain and Australia have seen their violent crime rates soar [tripod.com] since revoking the right of ordinary citizens to own guns.

Over 50 million people were murdered by their own governments during the 20th century, and the first thing these governments did to start their cleansing programs was outlaw guns for ordinary citizens [jpfo.org].

So tell me exactly why the Second Amendment makes no sense?

Standard == Flag To Rally 'Round

[rewinn]

Literally or figuratively, a "standard" is a flag that the troops rally around as we head into battle.

If we're lucky, we rally 'round because the standard inspires us and represents something we love.

If we're unlucky, we rally 'round because the Commissars are standing behind us with sidearms ... literally or figuratively.

Re:True standards qualify both ways

[superpulpsicle]

Hard to classify HTTP as a standard. It's more of a protocol. Even html has 8 million different syntaxes. Some suits Netscape, some IE etc.

Re:Formally informal

[gad_zuki!]

There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.

Re:Tests

[mlyle]

Standard n.
A flag, banner, or ensign, especially:
The ensign of a chief of state, nation, or city.

A long, tapering flag bearing heraldic devices distinctive of a person or corporation.

An emblem or flag of an army, raised on a pole to indicate the rallying point in battle.

The colors of a mounted or motorized military unit.

vs.

Indeed, that's what the word "standard" meant of old. A standard is a pole, a stick -- such as a flagpole, hence the term "standard-bearer".

So you're saying a flagpole is called a standard bearer because it.. bears a stick, rather than bearing a flag?

My OED is upstairs, but according to NOAD it's a shortening of Old French estendart, from estendre 'extend'.

Standards are about interoperability

[dr_pump95]

A "standard" exists so that independently developed entities can work together. Nuts and bolts, network protocols, whatever. Standards succeed when people really need interoperability, and the standard provides this in a convenient manner. X400 (ISO email) didn't succeed because SMTP was sufficient and was more convenient. X500 (ISO directory) didn't succeed because people didn't need it badly enough to spend the money on implementation. LDAP (dumbed-down X500 over TCP/IP) was more successful because it was cheaper and more convenient. Microsoft Word documents are a standard in the sense that people use them as a way to exchange formatted information that everyone can read (as long as they have the right version of Word ...). It works because most people already have compatible versions of Microsoft Word. Convenience again!

Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not the Windows software. Red wine bottles have one shape (with a sholder) and white wine bottles have a different shape (more sloping). This is true all over the world and has been true for a long time. How's that for a natural standard!

Re:I guess it depends on what you mean...

[anthony_dipierro]

Dare I ask what the point of putting it on a new line is? Seems like a waste of space to me. I'm especially annoyed by people who use:
}
else
{
when they could get along perfectly fine with:
} else {
Why waste all that space?

Re:I guess it depends on what you mean...

[anthony_dipierro]

Whitespace if your friend.

Not in excess, it isn't.

If your code is too dense it actually becomes harder for the next guy to figure out.

And if it isn't dense enough, it also becomes harder.

When the braces line up, readability increases as the eye will naturally follow the brace down to its partner.

I don't see the advantage here. Your eye is going to see the indentation and naturally follow the indentation down to where the indentation stops. You don't need a brace to do that.

Moving the brace on the same line produces asymmetric code that is rather unnatural for humans to read.

It's not any more or less natural to put the brace on the other line. You're just not used to it. If you were, you'd find just the opposite.

In addition, having the braces on separate lines helps if your formatting ever gets screwed up.

There are plenty of programs out there that will reformat your text for you in this (extremely rare) situation.

However, I have to say that I've lost far more time trying to read the same-line brace code (especially when idiots mix tab and space indents)

Is it so hard to change your tab spacing to match that of the "idiot"? Alternatively, you could go ahead and run indent or some similar program. Neither take very much time.

Re:Driving on the Right Side

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, part of the logic for driving on the right is that the guy that sits on the passenger side (whom is presumably right handed) can point a shotgun off the side of the road, wielding the gun with their good hands. Hence, riding "shotgun."

Housebricks

[ajs318]

Housebricks are pretty much the same size wherever you go, even in old buildings which predate the standard housebrick (215 x 102.5 x 65). Why? Because a housebrick is The Right Size For The Job: not too big to be manipulated with one hand, not so small that you need more of them per building.

Abe Lincoln and the 4'8" gauge railroads

[garyebickford]

Perhaps the oldest de facto standard still in use is the track width for US railroads (and some, but not all non-US). IIRC it's 4'8", which is: a) not really wide enough; and b) certainly not a nice round number like, for example, five feet.

The history is interesting, and demonstrates the power of an established de facto standard. (I don't recall the source for this, but I think it was a PBS TV show.) When the very first railroad cars were built, they were built by wagon makers, who used the same jigs and fixtures they used for wagons. Wagons had a de facto standard track width of four feet eight inches.

This track width dates back to Roman times. Roman chariots had this track width, because it worked correctly for the horses that they used. So for roughly 2000 years, wagons were generally made that size.

As railroads began to expand, they used a variety of gauges up to seven or eight feet. (The famed Orient Express had a seven foot gauge, IIRC.) Some early railroads used different gauges as a competitive measure, to prevent competitors from running trains on their track and requiring customers to change trains, often several times within a short trip.

Abraham Lincoln was President when the first transcontinental railroad was to be built, which would require that the different companies involved would have to use the same gauge. He actively questioned the "odd" 4'8" gauge, and after some discussion, signed a Presidential edict that all railroads henceforth must have a gauge of five feet. The railroads proceeded to totally ignore this law, and built everything in 4'8" gauge, thus demonstrating the power of de facto standards. So today, we (mostly don't) ride in railroad cars whose dimensions are descended directly from the width of a Roman horse's behind.