Standards Committees

Standards committees are the ultimate expression of people trying to solve problems they don’t understand and not talking to the end users of their standards.

Standards are useful when then represent targets of large implemented systems. For instance web browsers are useful because they implement a bunch of known standards.

It’s always good to ask the question “What problem are we solving?”

Couple of examples of that are web APIs. It’s best to ignore most of the HTTP protocol when implementing APIs for an application.

Another example is when we were considering the implementation of Iguana X’s grid protocols. Initially we tried using websockets since we were doing something similar - converting from an HTTPS connection to a grid connection.

But ditching web sockets made our code simpler and more symmetrical since once the connection was established we could forget about what was the “server” and what was the “client”. That made for a simpler design with less complexity which was more reliable.