[thelist] Why standards will be difficult for the web

[Bill Haenel]

One more tidbit from my friend in the Quality biz...

When I asked him,

"How would one go about moving in the direction of establishing standards
for an important technology that IS directive in nature? How do we get
inspectors to see that ISO reg'd companies ARE following it?",

he replied,

"Well, that is a giant question. Let me first say this, 'It would not work.'
If you would have a standard that everyone had to work to you would have to
stop developing new ways of doing things. No new commands or anything not
recognized by the 'Standard'. It takes a long time to get agreement on
changes to a standard as they are by consensus and not dictated by some
organization or government (agency). We are talking years to make a change,
however small. Remember that a directive is still only something recognized
by an accrediting body to apply to those that volunteer to comply with the
standard. To make anyone have to comply would require a law and that would
be one for each country where you want this to apply.

Just the above should answer your question and see why I said it wouldn't
work that way. Now, what I think you want is just a more stable definition
of what makes up your body of allowed coding language. Think how stable and
how many variants there are for Visual Basic yet it is fairly standard. I
think you may be referring to design criteria more than language. Somewhat
like the architect who has technical rules, building codes and techniques
but still has a free hand for the look of his projects. Unless he works in
Solvang of course.

Hope this gives you a start to understand what I am saying. We will have a
nice discussion on this one when I return. There is a way to set up minimum
points of agreement with straying outside this causing possible
incompatibility."

Maybe something we all knew, but interesting to hear what a 30-year plus
seasoned quality pro has to say about it.

BH