isitreal - 5:29 pm on Jun 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

For the most parts standard committees are just another playing field where megacorporations battle eachother for dominance. The company that can get the most of its design methodology scribed in the standard wins.

Very nicely put, first time I remember anyone trying to workout how this stuff really happens in these forums, usually it's painted more like a happy nevernever land type world where everything is being done by well meaning souls who only want the best for all of us. The picture you're drawing is far more accurate I think, but that's not going to stop anyone who believes that following standards actually has some instrinsic meaning or value outside of the scenario you outlined.

I'd add to this, many of the decisions made are made not so much as competition between organizations, but in order to establish a lingua franca, to smooth over the transfer of corporate data, things like XHTML 1 strict have virtually no use or meaning outside of that framework as far as I can see, it diminishes significantly what your webpage can do, so the advantage must come from something that has little or nothing to do with your or my webpages.

There is one genuine benefit that I've found for following standards, debugging html code. That's what I use it for, and that's a fairly valuable thing to have available, but it's the only actual advantage I can think of when it comes to following standards.