Your summary of standards is excellent. I was under the impression that
we've been talking about specifications all this time. The overarching
point I've been trying to make today is that we don't have the political
clout to create standards with the kind of force you explain.
And yet, when I file a bug against an R7RS implementation saying it doesn't conform to the spec, it's remarkable that it almost always gets fixed. Or if not, it's explained to me that it's inherent in the implementation (e.g. Chicken doesn't support rename-on-export from R7RS libraries) and can't be fixed without great pain. And then I say, "By all means, just note it in the docs as a deviation from R7RS." And they do. Obviously there is no question of coercion, even economic pressure, here.
Non-standard programming languages and web tech abound. Even Git
and Linux are not standard, and a gazillion dollars are tied to those.
LInux is a product, not a standard, but it does conform to lots of standards very thoroughly. I routinely move from Cygwin to Linux to BSD without even noticing. Linux distros also conform to higher-level standards.
That was a great read. Indeed, as you say it talks about coping with the
unexpected, not necessarily honoring it. But as HTML shows, people who
honor unreasonable requests are going to be more popular than people who
are strict.
Popular with whom? With the authors of crap HTML editors, and with people who want to write HTML by hand without learning. But mostly it was insurance that no competing browser would appear without a Google behind it.
John Cowan
http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan xxxxxx@ccil.orgCash registers don't really add and subtract;
they only grind their gears.
But then they don't really grind their gears, either;
they only obey the laws of physics. --Unknown