Bricks, Stones, Web Standards and the W3C

Bricks and Stones

The humble brick is a marvel: on every street, down every alley, in every odd corner, practically anywhere people live, you can find it.
Stones are not as ubiquitous as bricks, but they hold a respectable place too: you see them in all sorts of building materials, sculptures, stone tablets and so on.

If I asked what the difference is between these two utterly ordinary things, bricks and stones, some people might laugh. Bricks and stones have nothing to do with each other. Apart from some overlap in what they are made of and some uses in construction, they have almost nothing in common, and discussing their differences seems even more pointless.

That answer isn't really wrong, but it isn't a good line of thought, or a good angle from which to look at the question. Let's look at how bricks and stones differ from one particular angle.

What's the Difference?

First difference: bricks are man-made, stones are natural.

At first glance there's nothing really wrong with this, but it doesn't give you an "oh, that's it" feeling either. We keep asking: so what?

Second difference: bricks conform to a specific size, stones have basically no fixed shape.

Since bricks are man-made, they must serve some predetermined purpose. Bricks are used to build houses, while unprocessed natural stones come in all sorts of odd shapes and are of little use in construction. But this difference also seems to be a true but useless statement.

Now the third difference: bricks embody industrial standardization, stones embody the disorder of nature.

Now this gets interesting, because following this line of thought we can find a lot. A brick is no longer just a brick; it is also part of the process of industrialization. It is precisely this industrial standardization that lets bricks be produced more easily and cheaply, organized more easily, and serve industry itself better.

A small brick basically distills the most important qualities of industry. Compare stones: with all their irregular shapes, they're good for little more than piling up a makeshift wall. If you want stones to play a bigger role, you have to process them the way bricks are made, so they can interact more easily with their surroundings.

So from this angle, although bricks and stones differ in themselves, the bigger difference lies not in the things themselves but in what shows up when you put them in a group.

So What?

You may think all of the above is right, but what does it prove? It doesn't seem to affect our lives. We may not be able to say exactly how bricks differ from stones, yet we already use them the right way.

Of course, the difference between bricks and stones is quite interesting even when examined in depth, but what's more interesting is the difference it contains between industrial standardization and non-standardization. This idea of industrial standardization has been everywhere since the industrial age: memory, hard drives and cases that follow specific rules let us assemble a personal computer easily. If you drive abroad on vacation and lose a wheel or a screw, you can buy a dozen more on the spot instead of fetching them from home. By contrast, imagine a world without standardization: if you had a custom car built in your hometown and it broke down halfway through a trip, picture how awkward that would be.

In fact, all industrial standardization means much the same thing: some standardization lets things fit better into a group, and some lets things exist beyond space, time and particular people.

Fitting into a group is what the bricks above do. Existing beyond space and time means that people in different places and different eras can all, by convention, use the same specification without worrying about compatibility. Existing beyond particular people means that once something is standardized, its manufacture, maintenance and reproduction no longer depend on a specific person or group. McDonald's and Chinese cooking are good examples. Chinese cooking depends on personal experience and is hard to quantify and standardize; if certain master chefs kick the bucket, you may never again eat dishes as good as theirs. McDonald's is different: as long as there are quantified recipes and standardized production, it hardly matters who drops dead.

Standardization is so common that it has become transparent and vanished from our view, a kind of "vanished existence."

Web Standards

Recently I came across a classic front-end interview question again: "How do you understand web standards and the W3C?" The line of thought here is basically the same as above: whatever industrial standardization brings, web standardization brings too.

I won't go into the details of web standards here. Web standards are of course good. They provide sound, practical standards for content, presentation and behavior, and on that basis you can build web system architectures that are highly available, easy to understand and highly adaptable.

W3C

The value of a standard shows only after it has spread and is followed. The more people follow it, the greater the benefit, until what you finally have is one standard web system after another running on the internet. Because every web system is standard, they are friendly not only to humans but also to the higher-level systems that process them (search engines, for example).

There is a rule of thumb about the internet: the value of the internet is proportional to the square of the number of nodes it is made of. Web standardization is similar. Web standards let you build web systems with a clear structure, and these standard web systems join together into a larger standard system. This makes all kinds of work easier to carry out and lets more be built on top, creating more value. At that point it is like the bricks discussed earlier, or the shipping containers I mentioned in an earlier post.

The value of the web standards themselves is not what matters most; there may well be better standards than the current ones. A well-defined standard that spreads easily can create more value than a better standard that is hard to spread. History is full of similar examples.

As for the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), it leads the web standardization process and is responsible for drafting and promoting web standards. It has to make sure not only that the current standards are good in themselves, but also coordinate different vendors so that the standards are easier to accept and spread. It has a heavy responsibility and a long road ahead.