My entire time in the IT industry has been spent primarily
trying to develop, architect, test, mentor, evangelize, and educate
about one simple subject: Standards Appreciation!
The trouble with "Standards Appreciation" is that vendors see
standards from the following perspectives primarily:
- Yet another opportunity to lock-in the customer
- If point 1. fails then undermine the standard vociferously (an
activity that takes many covert forms; attack performance,
security, and maturity)
- Developers don't like standards (the real reason for this is
to-do lists and timeframes in most cases)
Korateng Ofusu-Amaah
providesinsightful perspective on the issues above, in a
recent "must read"
blog post about how this dysfunctionalityplays out today
in the realm of HTML Buttons and Forms. Here are some notebable
excerpts:
"Instead my discourse devolved into a case of I told you so,
a kind of Old Testament view of things instead of the softer New
Age stylings that are in vogue these days. Sure there was a little
concern for the users that had been hurt by lost data, but there
was almost no empathy for the developers who had to lose their
weekends furiously reworking their applications to
do the right thing especially because it appeared that they
would rather persist in trying to do the wrong thing.
The sentiment behind that mini tempest-in-a-teapot however was a
recognition of the fact that those
who have been quietly evangelizing the web style were talking about
the wrong thing and to the wrong people."
...
"..As application developers we should ask for better forms,
we should be demanding of browser makers things like XForms or Web
Forms 2.0 to make sure that we can go beyond the kind of stilted
usability that we currently have. Our users would appreciate our
efforts in that vein but for now, they know what to expect. Until
then application developers should push back when we are told to
"do the wrong thing".
There is an unfortunate mindset trend at the current time that
espouses: "Sloppiness" is good, and "Simple" justifies inadequacy
at all times. Today, the real focus of most development endeavours
is popularity first and coherance (backward compatibility,
standards compliance, security, scalability etc.) a distant second,
if you can simply make things popular then that justifies the
sloppiness (acquisition, VC money, Blogosphere Juice etc.).
Especially as someone else will ultimately have to deal with
thepredictable ramifications of the sloppiness.
Standards are critical to the success of IT investment within
any enterprise, but standards are difficult to design, write,
implement, and then comprehend; due to the inherent requirement for
abstraction -it's atop down, as opposed to bottom up,
process.
Vendors will never genuinely embrace standards, until IT
decision makers demand standards compliance of them, by
demonstrating a penchant for smelling out "leaky
abstractions" embedded within product implementations.
Naturally, this requires a fundamental change of mindset for most
decision makers.It means moving away from the"this
analyst said...", "I heard that company X is going to deliver....",
"I read that .....", "I saw that demo..."approach to product
evaluation, to a more knowledgeable evaluation processthat
seeks out the What, Why, and How of any prospective IT
solution.
Knowledge empowers all of the time. It's a gift that stands the
test of time once you invest some time in its acquisition
(unfortunately this gift isn't free!). Ignorance with all its
superficial seduction (free and widely available!), is temporary
bliss at best, and nothing butheartache over time.