[hakfoo]

> Then we have standards that come out like Bluetooth mesh or HomeKit that say this is exactly how a light switch should work. Great, except your light switch has this cool feature that Philips did not think of in the committee meeting and now you are forcing it in and your product once again suffers.

This seems like it could be solved by a meta-standardizzation: a standardized extensibility model. So the light bulb supports "on", "off", and "dim", and the vaccuum supports "begin cleaning", "return to charging base" and "open dust cup lid", but both support a "Get model-specific register and function list" command, yielding something like WSDL.

Maybe Philips bulbs activate their RGB disco seizure mode with Model Specific Function 82, and GE bulbs have colour temperature control on Model Specific Function 74, but so long as the bigger, smarter device controlling both can query this and package it up for users, it works fine. And when your new vaccuum has "knit new cat out of collected cat hair" they can define it as MSF 74 if they want, so long as the catalog is accurate.

[kadal]

This vaguely sounds like MIDI to me

[shimfish]

Or CSS extensions

[corrigible]

Or SNMP MIBS