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“You have to have certain standards” was a favourite saying of my old headmaster, usually after telling us to get our hair cut (this was the 1970s). “Man, what a square,” I used to think (I told you it was the 1970s). Actually, I still have occasional arguments along these lines, except that they are more polite, it’s “manager” not “headmaster”, and I've updated my vocabulary a little.
However, I have become increasingly in favour of standards. Not the kind my headmaster was talking about, which were just a case of “the likings and dislikings of society”, as John Stuart Mill put it, but the kind that people agree on because things won't work properly without them. Standards like HTML. I spent a long time last week redecorating our department website and in the process trying to make it compliant with HTML standards as laid down by the good people at the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). The problem is that the pages still come out weirdly on some browsers, and not just on Evil Microsoft Products. Netscape 4.7 on Linux can’t handle the fonts. Internet Explorer 4.0 looks OK, though misses a few things, but IE 5.0 chokes on some of the JPEG images (JPEG is another example of a good standard, BTW). Even Konqueror, the groovy (did I say I'd updated my vocabulary) browser/file manager/FTP client/PDF viewer from the clever hackers at KDE can’t handle the CSS “justify” command. Netscape announced with great fanfares that version 6.0 would be fully w3c-compliant, but a friend who is much better at web design than me (he teaches it) says it is anything but, adding caustically, “I have viruses that will do less harm than Netscape.” Overstated, perhaps, but enough to put me off upgrading to 6.0, since w3c-compliancy is about the only thing it has going for it (unless you actually like cheesy things like “My Sidebar”).
Admittedly, the WWW is a complicated place, so you can’t always expect browsers to display pages exactly how their authors intended. This, however, is why we need standards even more, so while a web author may not know exactly how a page will come out with Browser-X on Computer-Y running OS-Z, (s)he can at least be confdent that it will be comprehensible and not too ugly.
In the world of word processing, things are if anything worse, because we have pseudo-standards. A pseudo-standard is what happens when a bunch of people make a proprietary product so common that people mistakenly accept it as a standard, an example being the MS Word Document (.doc) format. Apart from its suitability as a virus-carrier, there are obscure technical reasons why this is a poor way to encode documents, but now we see people asking for documents such as job applications to be sent in .doc format. I’ve even seen academic journals, who really should know better, requiring this. The mentality behind this seems to be “I use Microsoft Word, all my friends use Microsoft Word, so the whole world must use Microsoft Word.” The idea that there are people out there who do not use Microsoft Word, or indeed Microsoft anything doesn’t seem to occur to them. To quote Mill again: “the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes into contact: his party, his sect, his church, his class of society” (On Liberty).
But many end users do not a standard make. Many more people use MS Word than use LaTeX, but still LaTeX is a standard, while .doc isn’t. By the way, by LaTeX I don’t mean the stuff condoms are made of, I mean the document-processing language. LaTeX is a standard because a bunch of people agreed on what should and shouldn’t go in it, and because it is open—anyone can look on the web or buy a book and find out exactly how to format a document in LaTeX just like they can with HTML. The .doc format, on the other hand, is owned and controlled solely by Microsoft, who are rather cagey about letting out the specs; for this reason it is notoriously difficult to write software to convert to and from .doc format (I once nearly gave a student zero for plagiarism because he submitted his essay as a .doc file and my word processor eliminated all the quotation marks!).
Perhaps this idea of computer standards and pseudo-standards can be applied back to social standards. We are constantly pressured to conform to pseudo-standards which merely reflect the preference of a particular powerful group. Cut your hair (but not too short). Wear a tie to work. Don't smoke/drink/be fat/be thin. Go to church. Don’t go to church. Now, I’m not saying that particular groups can’t set their own standards for their own members. In martial arts classes, there are a whole load of standards about politeness, dress, rank etc., but no one would insist on them being applied by non-martial artists, or even martial artists outside training. In the midst of these competing pseudo-standards, it is not surprising that genuine standards like simple common decency get pushed to one side.
Or is this just a ludicrous analogy brought on by too much caffeine?
However, I have become increasingly in favour of standards. Not the kind my headmaster was talking about, which were just a case of “the likings and dislikings of society”, as John Stuart Mill put it, but the kind that people agree on because things won't work properly without them. Standards like HTML. I spent a long time last week redecorating our department website and in the process trying to make it compliant with HTML standards as laid down by the good people at the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). The problem is that the pages still come out weirdly on some browsers, and not just on Evil Microsoft Products. Netscape 4.7 on Linux can’t handle the fonts. Internet Explorer 4.0 looks OK, though misses a few things, but IE 5.0 chokes on some of the JPEG images (JPEG is another example of a good standard, BTW). Even Konqueror, the groovy (did I say I'd updated my vocabulary) browser/file manager/FTP client/PDF viewer from the clever hackers at KDE can’t handle the CSS “justify” command. Netscape announced with great fanfares that version 6.0 would be fully w3c-compliant, but a friend who is much better at web design than me (he teaches it) says it is anything but, adding caustically, “I have viruses that will do less harm than Netscape.” Overstated, perhaps, but enough to put me off upgrading to 6.0, since w3c-compliancy is about the only thing it has going for it (unless you actually like cheesy things like “My Sidebar”).
Admittedly, the WWW is a complicated place, so you can’t always expect browsers to display pages exactly how their authors intended. This, however, is why we need standards even more, so while a web author may not know exactly how a page will come out with Browser-X on Computer-Y running OS-Z, (s)he can at least be confdent that it will be comprehensible and not too ugly.
In the world of word processing, things are if anything worse, because we have pseudo-standards. A pseudo-standard is what happens when a bunch of people make a proprietary product so common that people mistakenly accept it as a standard, an example being the MS Word Document (.doc) format. Apart from its suitability as a virus-carrier, there are obscure technical reasons why this is a poor way to encode documents, but now we see people asking for documents such as job applications to be sent in .doc format. I’ve even seen academic journals, who really should know better, requiring this. The mentality behind this seems to be “I use Microsoft Word, all my friends use Microsoft Word, so the whole world must use Microsoft Word.” The idea that there are people out there who do not use Microsoft Word, or indeed Microsoft anything doesn’t seem to occur to them. To quote Mill again: “the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes into contact: his party, his sect, his church, his class of society” (On Liberty).
But many end users do not a standard make. Many more people use MS Word than use LaTeX, but still LaTeX is a standard, while .doc isn’t. By the way, by LaTeX I don’t mean the stuff condoms are made of, I mean the document-processing language. LaTeX is a standard because a bunch of people agreed on what should and shouldn’t go in it, and because it is open—anyone can look on the web or buy a book and find out exactly how to format a document in LaTeX just like they can with HTML. The .doc format, on the other hand, is owned and controlled solely by Microsoft, who are rather cagey about letting out the specs; for this reason it is notoriously difficult to write software to convert to and from .doc format (I once nearly gave a student zero for plagiarism because he submitted his essay as a .doc file and my word processor eliminated all the quotation marks!).
Perhaps this idea of computer standards and pseudo-standards can be applied back to social standards. We are constantly pressured to conform to pseudo-standards which merely reflect the preference of a particular powerful group. Cut your hair (but not too short). Wear a tie to work. Don't smoke/drink/be fat/be thin. Go to church. Don’t go to church. Now, I’m not saying that particular groups can’t set their own standards for their own members. In martial arts classes, there are a whole load of standards about politeness, dress, rank etc., but no one would insist on them being applied by non-martial artists, or even martial artists outside training. In the midst of these competing pseudo-standards, it is not surprising that genuine standards like simple common decency get pushed to one side.
Or is this just a ludicrous analogy brought on by too much caffeine?
