Face Me And Scream

Written by: Michael Enger

In my many tirades concerning web standards, I go on and about how so-and-so company don’t support open standards, constantly push their own formats, or hate working together with other companies to make life better for consumers. I have never taken into account that people don’t really care. Who cares if Internet Explorer 6 is keeping the web in the stone ages with its quirky css implementation, a relic from the browser wars? Who cares if corporations still hold weight over standardization organisations when it comes to pushing their proprietary formats into people’s faces. Who cares if lobbying has come to the computer world and results in my country going ape shit over fairness?

I do.

Open standards, such as the ones put forth by the ISO, are formats and systems that are open to use by anyone, completely royalty free. They are created so as to avoid the confoundment that consumers experience when different companies do the same thing in different ways. They are the opposite of proprietary formats, which are created by a single party and where they prevent anyone from knowing how it works so that you have to come to them if you want to build anything around it. Being a nerd, I tend to favor the open formats and I will try to explain why.

Less hassle for the consumer
Think of batteries. The typical AA-type battery cell is a type of battery that everyone can easily recognize. Anytime you buy a new device that uses that type of battery you know where you can find it, the batteries are interchangeable between the devices and you don’t have to struggle with looking for new batteries when the device becomes obsolete. A cell phone battery is completely different, usually built to specifications determined by the company that designed it and sometimes to that specific phone. They are hard to come by, since only specialty stores stock them and if the phone becomes outdated then you’ll be hard pressed to find that type of battery.

Click to enlargeFrom the desk of Microsoft:
Hey, we know that you already have an open XML format for office documents, but we made our own so why don’t you just read through this massive document and let us know if it’ll be a standard. Or better yet; don’t read it and just pass it as law anyway.
KTHNXBAINo royalty fees
Judging by the amount of MP3-players out there, you would think that the MP3 format was open to be used by anyone but in actuality it isn’t. Someone owns the MP3 format and you’re required to pay royalty fees to them whenever you build a device or a program that can decode MP3 files. However, a certain convenience is that we’re not really sure who exactly owns the MP3 format, so people who build open MP3 encoders (such as the LAME encoder) can get away with it because nobody really knows who has the right to stop them. Ogg Vorbis was created to replace the MP3 because of the royalty issues.

The work is done for you
Say you want to create a word processing software. You’re tired of Word and OpenOffice and you want something that will automagically replace every swear word with a picture of a kitten so you go about your business building the program. When it comes to saving the files that you’ve created (filled to the brim with kittens), how should you do it? What contingencies should you plan for when determining the file format? How big should it be? Should it be plain-text or binary? What about pictures, how should they be stored? It’s a lot easier when all of those questions have been asked before and an open standard for storing written documents already exists, so you just have to follow the specifications to be able to open and save that type of file, independent of which program created it.

Negative aspects about open standards
To be fair, I should talk about what’s bad about open standards. First of all, they are slow to create. When you make a proprietary format you are under complete control over what you put into it and so decisions come quickly. However, open formats take a while to become mature since there are so many voices trying to incorporate their opinion on the standard. The Ogg Vorbis file format (mentioned above) doesn’t have official support for meta-data (such as the artist name or album) and it doesn’t look like it will be officially added anytime soon, so the end result is that the format isn’t really ready to be used on a grand scale.

Another negative aspect is that it opens up for competition. If anyone can use an open standard, then why would people want to use your program or device? If you make a video-editing software that uses an open format for saving video projects, what is stopping people from ditching your program for something else that uses the same format? Nothing, so to ensure that people are locked to using your software/device you should only support your own proprietary formats. This may have been a bit sarcastically said, but it’s probably the main driving force behind Apple and other companies when they fight against standardization.

Lastly; who the hell do you think you are to tell us what to do? Why should Microsoft, one of the biggest companies on the planet, listen to what a committee of hippies and nerds have to say about how a word document should be stored? Do you think that the collective minds of a community that really cares knows better than a giant corporation?

Click to enlargeLook, googling for “open standards” doesn’t really reveal a treasure trove of images to choose from, alright? You get a pretty girl to look at so stop complaining.Open standards make our lives easier. It means that you are not locked to using a specific program or device and you’re free to make a choice on what to spend your time and money on (and we have so many to make). Of course I understand that to non-geeks and the normal world it seems that we’re getting our panties in a bunch over something that is unessential to our having a pleasurable life, but I submit that we should get angry. We should be vocal about our displeasure with letting corporations decide what’s good for us. Although they have teams of people that study this full time, they will never come close to the understanding shared by the collective community of caring individuals. Open standardization makes it easier to communicate and share with each other, rather than forcing everyone into their respective shells simply because some people chose a Zune and others chose an iPod*.

* Personally I chose to use my phone as an MP3 player and avoid both of them