From: Erik Naggum <enag@ifi.uio.no>
Organization: Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Date: 27 Sep 1992 01:16:28 +0200
Subject: Re: ISO specs.

Robert Lewis Glendenning <rlglende@netcom.com> writes:
|
|   I have always heard the ISO standards guys described, disparagingly,
|   as "telephone bureaucrats".

Please!  Such comments are only causing harm, and should not be used.
Besides, it's the CCITT folks who are telephone bureaucrats.

|   The idea they can make $ out of standards documents, and the
|   decision to distribute on paper, certain makes them archaic minds.
|   They also don't seem to understand, or at least to be concerned
|   with, the process by which standards get translated into products.

Come on!  Your ignorance of ISO's standards and processes is showing.
ISO publishes standards for everything from the dimensions of nuts and
bolts, paper sizes, Systeme International units, bibliographic
references, and communication protocols, up to to document description
languages.  Please remember that ISO is not the same as OSI.

And "archaic minds"?  Just because you think you have the future of
information processing within your reach doesn't mean that other people
have archaic minds.  Geez.  Even if I'm about as negative about these
bloated OSI standards as the next Internet user and software developer,
I do consider ISO's procedures fit for about 99.5% of their areas of
work.  It's extremely unusual for random students and independent
consultants to have the slightest interest in what ISO does or does not
standardize.  This situation is new to ISO, and they're working on it.
Keep in mind that we're talking about perhaps 100 ISO standards out of
more than 11,000, and a handful of CCITT recommendations out of several
thousand.  (Let's not discuss the page counts, OK? :-)

|   Of course, it is difficult to think of international standards which
|   were developed in advance of the actual products which have resulted
|   in products. Hard to know whether this is due to the futility of such
|   a standards effort or to the bureaucracy by which it is accomplished.

Look, ISO got this stuff from CCITT.  CCITT has impressive track records
for standardizing communications protocols at the lower levels, and they
did more than a decent job describing the layering involved.  However,
CCITT doesn't know enough about applications and data representations to
warrant the same quality standards at layers above Network, primarily
because they confuse "user" and "subscriber", and don't talk to the
latter when they decide things.  ISO allows a fair amount of input into
their procedures from users.  (CCITT's standardization process is
essentially closed, while ISO's is essentially open to all.  The fact
that I, an independent consultant (as opposed to a telephone company),
take part in half a dozen ISO projects should speak for itself.)

This explains why X.400(1984) was such a disaster, and ASN.1 needed ISO
to clean it up.  The entire experiment should be regarded as CCITT
coming of age and entering the information age.  Perhaps the 1992
recommendations will be good enough that they can be implemented without
causing all sorts of random incompatibilities between "conforming
systems".  Cross your fingers.

ISO has been in the field of information technology for a decade or so
longer, and have far more expertise.  ISO has done a large amount of
good in this field, and only those intent upon flaming ISO for their OSI
blunders ignore very important standards for data interchange formats,
character sets, etc.  ISO is also quite liberal about accepting other
standards that are widely used, such as IEEE, ECMA, ANSI, DIN, and, yes,
CCITT standards.  CCITT (and IBM) are not that liberal.

Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum             |  ISO  8879 SGML     |      +47 295 0313
                        |  ISO 10744 HyTime   |
<erik@naggum.no>        |  ISO 10646 UCS      |      Memento, terrigena.
<enag@ifi.uio.no>       |  ISO  9899 C        |      Memento, vita brevis.
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso