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Today (October 14) is "World Standards Day", celebrating the founding of the ISO, also known as the "International Standards Organization". It's a good time to point out that people are wrong about standards.
You are reading this blog post via "Internet standards". It's important to note that through it's early existence, the Internet was
officially not a standard. Through the 1980s, the ISO was busy standardizing a competing set of internetworking standards.
What made the Internet different is that it's standards were
de facto not
de jure. In other words, the Internet standards body, the IETF, documented things that worked, not how they
should work. Whenever somebody came up with a new protocol to replace an old one, and if people started using it, then the IETF would declare this as "something people are using". Protocols were documented so that others
could interoperate with them if they wanted, but there was no claim that they
should. Internet evolution in these times was driven by rogue individualism -- people rushed to invent new things with waiting for the standards body to catch up.
The ISO's approach was different. Instead of individualism, it was based on "design by committee", where committees were
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