User:SurturZ

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Standards

Title text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Explanation

For any engineering task, there are numerous ways a given problem can be solved. The more complex the task, the more room for diversity. That's all well and good for a one-off problem, but if a design is meant to be iterated over time, or if an entire industry is solving that same problem, part reuse and interoperability become issues to deal with. Technical standards thus came to exist so that industries could avoid wasting resources reinventing the wheel, whilst offering their clients a certain amount of simplicity and compatibility between vendors.

But standards have issues of their own. They don't accommodate every use case, they might have restrictions or royalties attached, and people tend to be plagued by Not Invented Here syndrome. So competing standards have a tendency to arise to address different perceived needs. After a while, the market for competing standards gets messy and hard to follow, and integrating systems built around competing standards gets burdensome. As a result, someone eventually takes on the challenge of creating a universal standard that everyone can rally around.

This almost never works. In many cases, a new standard fails to displace the incumbent standards, eventually loses funding and support, and thus becomes a relic of history. In many other cases, it only penetrates far enough to survive, ironically making the situation messier. The latter situation often ends up becoming cyclical, with new standards periodically rising and failing to gain traction.

Three examples are given at the top of the comic: AC chargers, character encoding and instant messaging.

• Power adapters are notorious for varying from device to device - partly to try to prevent dangerous voltage/current mismatches, but partly just because manufacturers all chose different adapter designs. In 2011, Mobile phone chargers had mostly converged on a common USB-based solution, but laptop charging remained still a long way out, despite the adoption of yet another standard, IEC 62700, and Apple mobile devices generally used proprietary Lightning connectors. Randall notes that there was additional complexity due to the fact that there were also competing USB types; thanks to the European Union's common external power supply specification, micro-USB then won the day. In August 2014, the USB Type-C specification was published and started to displace micro-USB; it gained ground among laptop manufacturers as well. From 2021 to 2022, the EU successfully legislated for its common use.
• Character encoding is, in theory, a solved problem - Unicode is a standard for character sets which currently includes over 135,000 characters. However, Unicode is not an encoding, just an abstract representation of the characters, and there are several implementations which encode Unicode "code points" into usable characters (including the two most common, UTF-8 and UTF-16). Despite the success of UTF-8 Unicode, older encodings like Windows-1252 have stuck around, continuing to cause weird bugs in old software and websites to this day.
• Unlike the other examples, there has been little or no effort by instant messaging companies to make their services interoperable. There's more value to keeping IM as a closed platform so users are forced to use the company's software to access it. Some software, like the Trillian chat client, can connect to multiple different services, but there is essentially no way to, for example, send a Twitter message directly to a Skype user. ActivityPub is an example of a standard intended to be universal, so any software using it for instant messaging can be 'federated' with each other, but as the comic points out, all this has lead to is yet another competing standard.

The title text mentions mini-USB and micro-USB, which were different standards used in 2011. As of 2019 for most applications of small USB ports (especially for charging / connecting cell phones), mini USB has lost most of its relevance and micro USB is competing with USB-C, as well as some solutions only used by single companies (such as Apple). As of 2023, Apple has also switched entirely to USB-C after pressures from the European Union.

Not all standards are created equal. In the development of standards, private standards adopt a non-consensus process in comparison to voluntary consensus standards. Private standards in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector and the agri-food industry (governed by the Global Food Safety Initiative) are discussed in a publication from International Organization for Standardization.

Transcript

How Standards Proliferate

(See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)

Situation:

There are 14 competing standards.

Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.

Ponytail: Yeah!

Soon:

Situation: There are 15 competing standards.

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