Page III: A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies.
Even standards purists such as Perens and Bray say there'd be little to gain from turning PDF over to a standards body at this point.
"PDF is an example of a proprietary standard that has achieved so much inertia in the marketplace that it's hard to see where standardising it would benefit anyone much," Bray said.
Melonie Warfel, director of worldwide standards for Adobe, said Adobe participates in numerous standards bodies, including specialist groups creating open-standard extensions of PDF for archival and advertising uses. But the main PDF specification remains under Adobe's control so it can be quickly adapted to meet new needs, such as the bar-code capability recently added.
"If you start developing a standard through a standards body, it takes forever," Warfel said. "My concern is we wouldn't be able to keep up with technological changes."
But Adobe achieves most of the goals of open standards by publishing the PDF specification under liberal terms that allow other software makers to use it as they please, Warfel said.
Flash frozen
The standards picture gets a little fuzzier for Macromedia and its widespread Flash animation format. Macromedia began freely publishing the Flash specification in the late 1990s to encourage widespread adoption, a successful tactic that has resulted in the Flash client being installed on more than 95 percent of all Internet-connected PCs.
But Macromedia has declined to submit the specification to a standards body. And the market for Flash authoring tools, while spawning dozens of applications for creating little bits of Flash content, is still dominated by Macromedia applications.
"Comparing Flash to PDF, it's clear Adobe has done a better job of opening that format and fostering a community around the format," O'Grady said. "The thing with Flash that's a little different ... is that it's really just now starting to become more of a business tool. People are maturing in the use of the format."
Bray said he has "mixed feelings about Flash. It's clearly been useful on the Web, but it does bother me that it's owned by Macromedia, and they don't make much money on it. Are they going to have the energy and motivation to take care of it in the long term?"
Such worries have helped fuel a slowly building backlash against Flash and a groundswell in favour of SVG (scalable vector graphics), an emerging graphics standard endorsed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main body behind Web standards such as HTML.
"To some extent, I think Macromedia may have missed the boat," Perens said. "Eventually, browsers will all have SVG plug-ins, and at that point, Flash starts to become irrelevant."
David Mendels, general manager of Macromedia's tools and platforms group, said the company has supported open standards where it makes sense, including wide-ranging support for formats such as XML, SOAP -- even SVG. With Flash, the company was able to achieve open-standards goals without going through a standards body, he said.
"We don't think there's one approach that applies to the whole stack of things we have here," Mendels said. 'We made a commitment in the 1990s that we weren't going to keep (Flash) a narrow, quirky thing that doesn't interoperate with other people's products, and we've followed through on that. I think we've been very successful in making Flash a widely supported open standard."
"Some people have very strong religious views that everything should be open-source or everything should go through a standards body," he continued. "I don't have views like that ... I want to address what people are telling us are the real problems, through whatever vehicle makes sense."
Blog slog
One of the newest levels in standards limbo has been created by the booming popularity of Web logs. RSS, the specification that allows efficient posting and browsing of blogs ranging from news alerts to personal musings, was developed by pioneering software developer Dave Winer and is now managed by a Harvard Law School project, which distributes it under a liberal "creative commons" license.
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