[mattmanser]

I completely understand and sympathise with this sentiment, as I'm sure many others will.

It's one things to want standards, but when it's still an emerging field, with so much different functionality, it's an impossible task.

Any poster who advocates standardization at this stage would probably be wise in reading about the early computing days, when you had so many different standards, before it crystallized behind IBM MS-DOS. Or even HTML, where would we be today if MS had listened to "standards" and not released XMLHttpRequest/MSXML library.

No ajax, no modern web.

This is a perfectly normal, and perhaps desired, period of experimentation where standards will just hold the industry back.

[II2II]

Standards are convenient, but a lot of issues would be resolved if products were publicly documented. To my knowledge PostScript was never standardized and PDF has been standardized for about half of its history, yet they were both fairly well documented by the vendor. Contrast that to other popular document formats, or this bike, which had to be reverse engineered. Yes, documenting implementations adds overhead that inhibits the rate of progress. On the other hand, not documenting implementations are usually inhibits progress as well since it is all about short term gains.

[elephant_talk]

You have a valid point about velocity being held back by standards. But you don’t do yourself any favors, IMHO, pointing to the modern web as an example. If anything, the modern web is the perfect cautionary tale. Walled gardens, app churn, bloated apps. No way to use part of a service without all the crap that comes with it.

The modern web could stand to let off the gas.

[strken]

Are walled gardens and app churn really the fault of AJAX requests, though?

For that matter, would removing AJAX and modern JS have fixed anything, or would people have routed around the problem? Any alternate web I can imagine just ends up with everyone using Flash/Shockwave/Silverlight/Java applets, which are even worse. A handful of diehards stay on plain HTML, just like they do today, while everyone else moves to gigantic ad-ridden behemoths.

[elephant_talk]

Walled gardens aren’t the result of Ajax, no. They’re the result of insufficient or missing standards (or at least lack of standards enforcement).

How many times do you encounter a website that doesn’t support your OAuth provider of choice? So you keep 2 or 3 around, and oh this site only does their own password based auth, OK I’ll use my password manager to make a one-off for this site.

Keep in mind, JS itself was developed by one browser vendor (Netscape IIRC) because there was a lack of a standard for interactivity on the web. These tools arise out of need, but because of capitalism the players creating the tools don’t work together. They stand to benefit if they can “win” and starve the others until the other solutions die, so that’s what they hope to do. It’s anti-consumer.

I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe it should be illegal for apps not to allow certain levels of interoperability and freedom to migrate. Hence a previous poster’s term, “GDPR-sized hammer”.

[Cieplak]

It's also interesting to consider how standardization can similarly maintain an industry dominated by larger players, trying to establish their moat through regulatory capture.

Sort of a duality to how lack of standards propels innovation in the nascent days of a technological field.

Not saying there shouldn't standards in general; simply that we should be cognizant of market forces using standardization efforts as offensive tactics.

[moron4hire]

> I completely understand and sympathise with this sentiment, as I'm sure many others will.

I don't. He's basically admitting his engineers are incapable of reading relatively short, well-written spec documents.

This stuff is standardized. BLE is extremely easy to use, both on a device and in an application. BLE makes it possible to create self-documenting devices that any application could use. Device manufacturers are going out of their way to prevent that from happening.

[btashton]

We wrote a Bluetooth mesh product before there was Bluetooth mesh standard. Don't call me lazy for not publishing a short spec when the actual Bluetooth spec is over 100 pages. BLE is "easy" managing a mesh network with transactions , droped packets, authentication, 100s of settings across different products is not. Instead we focused on the product we were trying to sell and things people actually bought based on like Alexa and Google support. We had lots of internal docs that heavily documented things including things that would damage the performance of the network and experiments that failed in practice.