Dilbert Deconstructs "Industry Standards"

I often times feel like this when I am told by upper management to try and push a change on a vendor that will mitigate a problem specific to our architecture. Most of the time the support person is gracious, saying they will take it to their product development team. But, deep down, I know that as soon as the team hears the request/suggestion it goes straight to the waste bin.

This effect is very noticeable in the HTML 5 process. <video> is an attack on Adobe; offline storage is Google's attempt to make Gears a browser built-in so GMail works better everywhere, etc.

But is this really so bad? With luck, you get a compromise that works reasonably well for everyone. If you just leave the standards body to get on with it by themselves, they produce theoretically elegant but totally impractical standards like XHTML 2.0 (or, even earlier, HTML 3.0).

Having actually helped to write some standards (W3C, BSI, etc) I can say this is occasionally true, but mostly false, in my experience.

It's a cute cliche, but I think there are other issues behind the apparent grinding pace of standards, particularly web standards.

Or Microsoft pushing for a single worldwide patent system:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10334285-92.html?part=rss&#...