Six unpopular opinions about software standard development

Unpopular opinions:<p>1) Sometimes it is good with multiple standards so you can choose whatever you want (e.g. databases).<p>2) Sometimes it is good with enforcing a single standard. There is no value in European countries having different 220V plugs. And definitly no value in multiple 220V standards within a single country.<p>2b) Often it is much more valuable that everybody use the same standard than having the best standard.<p>3) The proper selection of #1 or #2 does not happend automatically. Sometimes it does, sometimes we have to force a selection. (Often Government does a good job here, but I assume it is too controversial for HN to praise governments).

Unpopular opinion: people ranting about one aspect of a topic in relation to a specific issue, should stick to that.<p>Writing a generic rant against all standards isn’t really productive because makes it hard to take you seriously.

&gt; Email is unencrypted because some value-extracting tech companies are controlling large parts of the infrastructure, and there is a systemic problem with gatekeeping that suppresses innovation.<p>Huh? I can only assume that the other isn’t referring to S&#x2F;MIME or PGP, etc., but to encryption of transport and&#x2F;or storage. Or maybe they are limiting their consideration to web based email?<p>That assumption is based on decades of PKI experience: unless every message is encrypted and signed, by default, without user action, and somehow (notice the hand waving) users are automatically enrolled in a seamless, invisible, low friction, key management system, encrypted email is just too complicated for most people.<p>There are so many moving parts, from getting a certificate, be it PGP or X.509 or something else, to having a working email client with encryption, to knowing that everyone else does, to deciding whether or not every email should be cleartext, signed, encrypted, or encrypted and signed.<p>I’ve taught this stuff and it is surprising how many people think a signed email has some level of confidentiality protection just because it isn’t readable text anymore (clear-signed aside).<p>The reason that web clients don’t offer encryption or signature is most likely because it is a support nightmare.<p>We’ve known HOW to do this stuff from a technical perspective for decades. What we have yet to figure out is how to make the UX acceptable or elegant or pleasant or seamless.

In the old days you needed to adhere to standards such as ISO to be able to bid on government contracts. If you weren&#x27;t standardized then that was a barrier to bidding for a government tender. I was never really aware of how deeply such standardization impacts software development. When the market maker is the US government or Dept. of Defense then you will do what they require or be on the outside.

That blog post misses nearly all the point of the XKCD comic it is referring to. Having jpeg, and gif, and tga, and other &quot;standard&quot; image formats is a great thing. But deciding to create another standard believing you can get rid of all the other &quot;x&quot; standards is (almost always!) folly. That is the point of the comic. This is an anti-pattern that constantly comes up in software dev and other domains, and it is deeply problematic. Creating standards for new ideas, or new takes on old ideas, is not the issue.

Are you really going to get a whole lot of argument when pointing out that memes lack nuance?<p>There will always be people who object reflexively to any proposal. You can and should simply ignore them. But be careful not to filter out substantive objections at the same time. Sometimes when someone expresses an objection that makes no sense to you, it&#x27;s you who isn&#x27;t understanding something, not them (and, of course, sometimes it&#x27;s them).

Currently, this article is flagged.<p>Regardless of whether you agree or not, there is no reason to flag this article, unless you are doing so in order to suppress opinions.

I think the author misunderstood the XKCD—they use it to complain about the idea that standardization=good. But the comic is not pro standardization. It is a criticism of standardization for its own sake.