Comment by friendzis
8 months ago
> (I'm at a loss to explain what benefit comes from being assigned an ISO standard versus putting a HTML document on the Internet.)
Single source of truth. The internet has been plagued by numerous incompatible implementations of the same thing. There are numerous tests [0] showing incompatibility between simple serialization format JSON. How many times have you heard "Yeh, nice feature, but virtually nothing implements it"? A standard becomes whatever majority of highly adopted implementations do instead of formal specification. This is what you get for putting a HTML document on the internets. ISO standardization somewhat reduced this effect.
> but I don't think there's a meaningful "toll gate" in this case: the standards are already free and public
Major problem with ISO standards is that they cross-reference each other. It's rare NOT to find definition "X as defined in ISO 12345". Complex product may need to reference hundreds of ISO standards.
Somewhat tautologically I agree with you as in reality things are probably going to be implemented referencing tutorial subtly incompatible tutorials on the internet but will claim ISO compatibility.
> Single source of truth.
So to get a single source of truth we make, presumably, the same truth have more sources.
I think I know what you mean (sources as in standards organizations, not individual standards), but I also think that people arrive at this odd position because they aren't actually thinking about the practicality and the absurdity of making the world more complex and confusing.