Standards! We Must Have Them!
Apr. 20th, 2012 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThat was sarcasm.
Once upon a time, I wrote test code for a C/C++ compiler. This was before they let me work on the compiler itself, partially out of desperation. In any event, I'll never forget hearing my coworker repeatedly propose taking the ARM out to a gun range and using it for target practice. The coworker in question was not a gun sort of guy, either (I think he was vegan, actually, not that those are necessarily incompatible).
A little later, I worked for a company that was attempting to develop a new web browser (this was just before browsers suddenly became Free) and had the Brilliant Idea to use an SGML rendering engine and actually implement HTML the way its propaganda said it had been devised: as an instance of SGML. Ha! A quick perusal of the way HTML of the time was actually written suggested an SGML rendering engine would not actually be able to render any of it, it was so badly formed. I wound up using Lex (but not YACC, altho I thought about it) to create a tool that took Typical HTML and produced well-formed HTML that was probably pretty close to what the person had intended, and that the SGML engine could cope with.
Then the project was canceled and I went to work elsewhere, at an internet bookseller, might have heard of them. Starts with an A. There, I worked on combining information from a variety of sources to create a catalog that was the basis for detail pages and used at many points in the supply chain. Before I got there, ISBNs were being used more or less as SKUs, but there were a lot of problems with this. A bunch of small publishers abused their ISBNs (treated them as ranges and incremented the check digit rather than using it as a check digit, reused ISBNs, etc.). Also, we had items listed in a source with "fake" ISBNs that we would have liked to sell also. When Amazon wanted to branch out into additional categories of items, we needed a definitive solution BUT it had to fit within the 10 letter/character field because all of our internal software was based on that. I thought that was A SIN, but I proposed a base 36 solution to our problems, and we collectively pretended that stood for Amazon Standard Identification Number, except S.K., who figured it was arc sin.
I think it's safe to say I have a small amount of experience with standards and what's wrong with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Smith#ISBN_catalogue_invention
The ISBN was created by a retail chain in the 1960s to help it keep track of books. It then went on to do what lots of standards do (create jobs for persnickety people whose ability to make reasonable cost/benefit judgments is congenitally impaired). When article numbers and product codes got invented (a little hazy on how that got started -- I suspect a chain in Japan somewhere, then jumped to Europe and then became international), space was carved out within one/some of them for ISBNs to live in, leading to our 13 digit ISBN world that plays better with scannable product codes than it did in its 10 digit incarnation.
With this history, consider these statements, appearing on the same page of ISBN International's 2010 study summary:
"Retailer needs and requirements are an important driver of product identification behaviour."
and
"US e-book stakeholders appear to be unconvinced that there is any business case for assigning ISBNs to separate e-book versions (where there is lack of consensus on whether these versions represent separate products). This is particularly true of the publishers interviewed, most of whom produce a single master file and use intermediaries to convert this to different formats. (The International ISBN Agency also notes that the vast majority of e-book business in the trade sector is through a limited number of dominant channels, each of whom has published a different set of requirements for ISBN assignment by publishers, as well as assigning their own proprietary identifiers to sell direct to consumers.)"
I'm going to supply a translation for that: the publishers ISBN International talked to didn't want to put any money into separate e-book versions since what they were doing was supplying an electronic master file (or, at times, a paper book) to Amazon and Amazon was doing the conversion. Possibly other people were also. And Amazon couldn't imagine any reason to buy an ISBN for all these ebooks when they could create their own, more compatible with their own systems identifier for free.
I'm serious when I say standards become job-creators after a certain point.
Once upon a time, I wrote test code for a C/C++ compiler. This was before they let me work on the compiler itself, partially out of desperation. In any event, I'll never forget hearing my coworker repeatedly propose taking the ARM out to a gun range and using it for target practice. The coworker in question was not a gun sort of guy, either (I think he was vegan, actually, not that those are necessarily incompatible).
A little later, I worked for a company that was attempting to develop a new web browser (this was just before browsers suddenly became Free) and had the Brilliant Idea to use an SGML rendering engine and actually implement HTML the way its propaganda said it had been devised: as an instance of SGML. Ha! A quick perusal of the way HTML of the time was actually written suggested an SGML rendering engine would not actually be able to render any of it, it was so badly formed. I wound up using Lex (but not YACC, altho I thought about it) to create a tool that took Typical HTML and produced well-formed HTML that was probably pretty close to what the person had intended, and that the SGML engine could cope with.
Then the project was canceled and I went to work elsewhere, at an internet bookseller, might have heard of them. Starts with an A. There, I worked on combining information from a variety of sources to create a catalog that was the basis for detail pages and used at many points in the supply chain. Before I got there, ISBNs were being used more or less as SKUs, but there were a lot of problems with this. A bunch of small publishers abused their ISBNs (treated them as ranges and incremented the check digit rather than using it as a check digit, reused ISBNs, etc.). Also, we had items listed in a source with "fake" ISBNs that we would have liked to sell also. When Amazon wanted to branch out into additional categories of items, we needed a definitive solution BUT it had to fit within the 10 letter/character field because all of our internal software was based on that. I thought that was A SIN, but I proposed a base 36 solution to our problems, and we collectively pretended that stood for Amazon Standard Identification Number, except S.K., who figured it was arc sin.
I think it's safe to say I have a small amount of experience with standards and what's wrong with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Smith#ISBN_catalogue_invention
The ISBN was created by a retail chain in the 1960s to help it keep track of books. It then went on to do what lots of standards do (create jobs for persnickety people whose ability to make reasonable cost/benefit judgments is congenitally impaired). When article numbers and product codes got invented (a little hazy on how that got started -- I suspect a chain in Japan somewhere, then jumped to Europe and then became international), space was carved out within one/some of them for ISBNs to live in, leading to our 13 digit ISBN world that plays better with scannable product codes than it did in its 10 digit incarnation.
With this history, consider these statements, appearing on the same page of ISBN International's 2010 study summary:
"Retailer needs and requirements are an important driver of product identification behaviour."
and
"US e-book stakeholders appear to be unconvinced that there is any business case for assigning ISBNs to separate e-book versions (where there is lack of consensus on whether these versions represent separate products). This is particularly true of the publishers interviewed, most of whom produce a single master file and use intermediaries to convert this to different formats. (The International ISBN Agency also notes that the vast majority of e-book business in the trade sector is through a limited number of dominant channels, each of whom has published a different set of requirements for ISBN assignment by publishers, as well as assigning their own proprietary identifiers to sell direct to consumers.)"
I'm going to supply a translation for that: the publishers ISBN International talked to didn't want to put any money into separate e-book versions since what they were doing was supplying an electronic master file (or, at times, a paper book) to Amazon and Amazon was doing the conversion. Possibly other people were also. And Amazon couldn't imagine any reason to buy an ISBN for all these ebooks when they could create their own, more compatible with their own systems identifier for free.
I'm serious when I say standards become job-creators after a certain point.