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.
ActivityPub :) People spend an incredible amount of time on social media—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and YouTube—so it’d be nice to liberate that.
https://cuelang.org/. I deal with a lot of k8s at work, and I’ve grown to hate YAML for complex configuration. The extra guardrails that Cue provides are hugely helpful for large projects.
Oh, this looks great!
I’ve been struggling between customize and helm. Neither seem to make k8s easier to work with.
I have to try cuelang now. Something sensible without significant whitespace that confuses editors, variables without templating.
I’ll have to see how it holds up with my projects
Oh this! YAML was a terrible choice. And that’s coming from someone who likes Python and prefers white spaces over brackets. YAML never clicked for me.
The term open-standard does not cut it. People should start using “publicly available and sharable” instead (maybe there is a better name for it).
ISO standards for example are technically “open”. But how relevant is that to a curious individual developer when anything you need to implement would require access to multiple “open” standards, each coming with a (monetary) price, with some extra shenanigans [archived] on top.
IETF standards however are actually truly open, as in publicly available and sharable.
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
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.
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.
ISO 216 paper sizes work like this: https://www.printed.com/blog/paper-size-guide/
It’s so fucking neat and intuitive! How is it not used more???
It’s also worth noting that switching from ANSI to ISO 216 paper would not be a substantial physical undertaking, as the short-side of even-numbered ISO 216 paper (eg A2, A4, A6, etc) is narrower than for ANSI equivalents. And for the odd-numbered sizes, I’ve seen Tabloid-size printers in America which generously accommodate A3.
For comparison, the standard “Letter” paper size (aka ANSI A) is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. (note: I’m sticking with American units because I hope Americans read this). Whereas the similar A4 paper size is 8.3 inches by 11.7 inches. Unless you have the rare, oddball printer which takes paper long-edge first, this means all domestic and small-business printers could start printing A4 today.
In fact, for businesses with an excess stock of company-labeled #10 envelopes – a common size of envelope, measuring 4.125 inches by 9.5 inches – a sheet of A4 folded into thirds will still (just barely) fit. Although this would require precision folding, that’s no problem for automated letter mailing systems. Note that the common #9 envelope (3.875 inches by 8.875 inches) used for return envelopes will not fit an A4 sheet folded in thirds. It would be advisable to switch entirely to A series paper and C series envelopes at the same time.
Confusingly, North America has an A-series of envelopes, which bear no relation to the ISO 216 paper series. Fortunately, the overlap is only for the less-common A2, A6, and A7.
TL;DR: bring reams of A4 to the USA and we can use it. And Tabloid-size printers often accept A3.
Presumably you could just buy that paper size? They’re pretty similar sizes; printers all support both sizes. I’ve never had an issue printing a US Letter sized PDF (which I assume I have done).
Kind of weird that you guys stick to US Letter when switching would be zero effort. I guess to be fair there aren’t really any practical benefits either.
I’ve literally never even seen A paper in America. Probably would have to special order it from another country
