Standards by Convention

[Previous] [Next]

In addition to standards that develop by consensus of the players in a given community, useful standards have been widely adopted simply because they work well and people agree to use them. Just because a standard hasn't been adopted by a national or international organization or industry group doesn't mean we cannot or should not use it.

Adobe PostScript is a great example of a de facto standard. Adobe created PostScript as a way to describe the layout of printed text on paper so that the page can be faithfully rendered after being transmitted electronically. PostScript is an extremely useful "standard" that has withstood the test of time. Adobe put the language in the public domain, and other companies created PostScript interpreters that could read PostScript documents created on any machine.

Some of Adobe's competitors believed that a standardized page description language (PDL) was necessary to keep this important specification open. In the early 1990s, the ISO embarked on a plan to create a standardized PDL that would be vendor-neutral and therefore, the submitters thought, widely adopted.

After a couple of years of experimentation, the group created the Standard Page Description Language (SPDL). SPDL is essentially PostScript out of the box, with a page-boundary indicator. Although hundreds of printer manufacturers have adopted PostScript as a PDL, and millions of people create and use PostScript documents every day, I don't know of a single implementation of SPDL.

The BizTalk Open Document Specification is another standard developed by interested parties outside of the "standards industry." The BizTalk spec is available to the public on the BizTalk Web site at http://www.biztalk.org (more about BizTalk in Part II of this book).



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net