Daily misery

I am going to bitch about standards and their conformity level in the web technology world today.

I ask myself the same question almost everyday while developing web sites/applications that are cross platform, cross browser and cross-whatever-people-like-you-and-me are using to access the web.

Being a web developer, I learn how to cry, beg and get over with it. But this shouldn’t be the case in the first place.

Standard is important simply because there’re so many ways to achieve the same thing by going through different routes. Even more so in the software world where you have so many scripting languages with different implementations. In many ways, it works beautifully and provides many alternatives for us. Alternatives are good. Licking good! But when it comes to integration, it will be so much easier if both totally different applications are adhere to standards, even though they use different API’s and libraries or even languages. Its like documentation, only with proper writing format.

Standards can be official or non official, as long as for the most part they’re widely recognized. Official standard would be something like w3c.org. Unofficial standard would be like to use abstraction in your codes and make it as an object. Those are standards that promote good practices and clarity to better serve everyone - both developers and users.

As always, there’s a catch. It is not good enough to just have a standardized system. Somehow, that is almost always subjected to ’standard monopolization’ by a certain entity that just so happen to have the same proprietary standard as the ‘openly recognized’ standard (*ahem* Verisign *ahem* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray *ahem* M$ Word document *ahem*). It needs to be an open standard. A standardized system where guidelines and rules are discussed, drafted, tested and published publicly.

It can work and it will work and it doesn’t have to be a lock-in system. I spend most of my time trying to make sure what I’ve created are ‘the same’ across multiple environments and I wish one day I could just say ‘you know what, life’s too short for that. You’re not complying with the standard, so too bad sucker!’.

By the way, we (as in US) really need to switch to metric system.