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The Internet is built upon standards. For those who have been involved in the process of building standards, or have paid attention, they know that many standards fail and only certain types of standards succeed.
- BuyIn?. Use FairProcess and involve the key stakeholders, or else no one will implement the standard and it will die.
- WorseIsBetter. Don't aim for perfection because it will never get done. Rather, solve the problem of the day and move on. Later on, a new standard will come along to replace yours.
- KeepItSimpleStupid. A standard that is too hard to implement (correctly) will not spread as quickly as one that is relatively inexpensive to implement.
- RequestForComment?. A whitepaper or technical that note that is non-binding, but explains the standard in implementable detail.
- ReferenceImplementation?. A reference implementation helps other developers verify their implementations against some standard, as well as demonstrating algorithms and other knowledge necessary to build a working example. More to the point, it shows that a working example can be built. A ReferenceImplementation? need not be complete; the W3C only requires that each feature in the standard be implemented somewhere. However, without implementing everything in one place, inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and other internal invalidity is undetected.
- DecentralizedControl?. The more the standard fits into the EndToEnd view of the Internet, the less it requires a central authority to police it, the quicker it will be adopted, as centralization acts as a drag force. Further, centralization cannot scale as quickly as decentralization. (similar to CommunityMayNotScale)
- EndToEnd. Build from client to client, and don't worry about the inner structure of the network. It is an inter-network after all.
See also [Information Axioms]