Real standards are open standards : documentation and basic code should be
Royalties-Free, with no patent in the way.
Proprietary format may be sometimes considered as "defacto standard",
but are not real standard
Proprietary format and patent are a threat to the free access to your own
data !
Gif vs PNG
: patents (Unisys and IBM) cover the LZW compression algorithm which is used
in making GIF
The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired
on 18 June 2004, in Japan patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada until
7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expires 11 August 2006,
GIF Image Format (Unisys), Hyperlinking/Hypertext (British Telecom), JPEG
(Forgent Networks), MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11), W3C P3P (Intermind),
RDF (Unified Data Technologies, Ltd.), Rights Expression Language (ContentGuard's
XrML), Stylesheets: CSS, XSL (Microsoft), XPointer (Sun Microsystems)
A vicious way to enter open standards : RAND "reasonable and non-discriminatory"
fees
RAND will hurt open source developers
RAND discriminates against the poor (developers or developing countries)
The RAND / RF split will fragment the Web. Some examples were given where
encumbered technologies may be worked around: Token ring v. Ethernet, PNG
v. GIF, SVG v. Flash, MP3 v. Ogg Vorbis