standard

standard Standards are necessary for interworking,

portability, and reusability. They may be de factostandards for various communities, or officially recognised

national or international standards.

Andrew Tanenbaum, in his Computer Networks book, once said,

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of

them to choose from", a reference to the fact that competing

standards become a source of confusion, division,

obsolescence, and duplication of effort instead of an

enhancement to the usefulness of products.

Some bodies concerned in one way or another with computing

standards are IAB (RFC and STD), ISO, ANSI, DoD,

ECMA, IEEE, IETF, OSF, W3C.

(1999-07-06)