There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
why do we call standards open when they require people to pay for access to the documents? to me that does not sound open at all
It’s a historical quirk of the industry. This stuff came around before Open Source Software and the OSI definition was ever a thing.
10BASE5 ethernet was an open standard from the IEEE. If you were implementing it, you were almost certainly an engineer at a hardware manufacturing company that made NICs or hubs or something. If it was $1,000 to purchase the standard, that’s OK, your company buys that as the cost of entering the market. This stuff was well out of reach of amateurs at the time, anyway.
It wasn’t like, say, DECnet, which began as a DEC project for use only in their own systems (but later did open up).
And then you have things like “The Open Group”, which controls X11 and the Unix trademark. They are not particularly open by today’s standards, but they were at the time.
Because non-open ones are not available, even for a price. Unless you buy something bigger than the “standard” itself of course, like a company that is responsible for it or having access to it.
There is also the process of standardization itself, with committees, working groups, public proposals, …etc involved.
Anyway, we can’t backtrack on calling ISO standards and their likes “open” on the global level, hence my suggestion to use more precise language (“publicly available and sharable”) when talking about truly open standards.
