Week 3: About "Internet Standards"

From reading the article “Internet Standards, Protocols, and languages”, I understand it is really a daunting task to develop a uniform international standard! Standardization and interoperability might continue to be unsolved issues in a short term. Interrelationships of the organizations and entities are too complex. However, I believe people will find out a good solution finally at the strong desire.

Question 1: How do standards impact our ability as communicators to reach our target audiences? I think standard is like a converter. In other words, it provides the platform.

Firstly, it is a necessary condition for Internet data sharing between message senders and receivers. Standards make our contents gain ground. “Protocols are agreed-upon methods of communicating and transmitting data between telecommunications devices.” “A computer language is an agreed-upon method of communicating, but the focus is on communicating with the computer and its operating system.” So, standards, protocols and languages have very close relationship.

Secondly, it makes global communication available. As the author said: “Regardless of whether the topic is standards, protocols, or languages, the common thread in international unification of methods is interoperability and platform-neutral specifications. Technology providers, businesses, consumers, and government agencies all recognize the need for compatibility.”

The “seven layers” of the OSIM are also suitable to describe this question:

• Application layer. This layer is a “service” used to communicate with the actual application in use. It performs such tasks as converting messages into the necessary format for use by the application.
• Presentation layer. This layer negotiates the syntax (format) of the data
transferred.
• Session layer. This layer is responsible for establishing and maintaining
communications channels. It negotiates packet recovery and provides
synchronization checkpoints for data packets transmitted.
• Transport layer. This layer provides data reliability and integrity checks of the data received by the ultimate end node. It also performs error detection and control functions.
• Network layer. This layer performs data routing and delivery across multiple (intermediate) nodes.
• Data link layer. The layer performs the transmission of data and error control from one node to another node (a single communications link).
• Physical layer. This layer performs the physical transfer of bits to the
transmission medium; it is the data communications interface with the
hardware.

Question 2: When (why) might we chose to deliver information that does not conform with standards?

Here I think the other article--"Information Interaction Design" could answer this question. As Shedroff said, “Data is useful only to producers or anyone playing a role in production. Data is not meant for ‘consumers’ and too often we deluge our audience with data instead of information, leaving them to sort it out and make sense of it. Many providers even boast of the large amount of meaningless, contextless data they throw at their customers.”

“Successful communications do not present data. If, for example, presenters haven't bothered to provide context and build meaning, audiences have little patience for doing it themselves. As designers, we constantly must ask ourselves what service we provide.”

So, we might deliver information that does not conform with standards, when the standards obstruct our audiences from understanding or enjoying the content we send.