Proprietary standards

[FSME]

I wasn't really sure what forum to post this in but I guess it'll be ok here.
I was taking with a friend about imode and their chtml-based communication. My friend said it's a proprietary system and not a standard, so I went on and did some research and found some submissions on W3C.org concerning the topic and as far as I know, chtml is freely usable but not (yet?) a standard. So we started wondering about definitions.

How do you exactly define a standard?
What exactly does "proprietary" mean?
And what's a proprietary standard then?
What of these would chtml be?

[joh6nn]

webster's definition of standard:
3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION
4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality

only if a specification comes from such an authority (eg, the W3C, the Army, etc), is it a standard.

webster's definition of proprietary:
2 : something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker; specifically : a drug (as a patent medicine) that is protected by secrecy, patent, or copyright against free competition as to name, product, composition, or process of manufacture.

proprietary and standard are mutually exclusive. you can be standard, or you can be proprietary, but you can't be both.

i don't know what chtml is. the only time i've ever seen 'c' in front of html is on windows, in help file formats. i'm guessing, that if it has been submitted to the W3C, but not yet accepted, then it is proprietary.

[boxer_1]

Just so everyone will know, the 'c' in chtml stands for compact. Its a subset of HTML for small information devices, such as smart phones and PDAs.

Like its name suggests, its just a pared down version of html with limited support (ie: no support for jpeg or tables). From what I've heard, it has been around since 1998 and is slowly becoming obsolete as xhtml becomes more widely implimented .

[joh6nn]

what would even be the point? the browser gets decide how to handle the html. if it doesn't want to display a table, then let it ignore the table. geez. people come up with the stupidest ideas sometimes.

[boxer_1]

Originally posted by joh6nn
what would even be the point? the browser gets decide how to handle the html. if it doesn't want to display a table, then let it ignore the table. geez. people come up with the stupidest ideas sometimes.

Good question, I guess cell phones were in mind when chtml was developed. Here's a link with more complete information in chtml in case anyone is interested.

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-compactHTML-19980209/#www3

[FSME]

Thanks for those defs. But what about e.g. the MS *.doc format? We thought it would be a standard but at the same time still proprietary. Or is it rather a quasi-standard, not officially standardized but still used by (almost) everybody?

For chtml: yes it was initially used and developed for mobile phones and imode (www.nttdocomo.com) is using it. I don't know of any other service, most services I know use xhtml.

[jkd]

Most webstandards are derived from W3C Recommendations, and the ECMA group (ECMA standardized Javascript as ECMAScript, and will be watching Javascript 2.0 closely to finalize its next version of ECMAScript)

As for .doc, I hope it never becomes a standard as I really don't feel like installing StarOffice or OpenOffice on my Linux distro, though it is a defacto standard for many corporations relying on MS Office.

[sabinuta]

I have only good things to say about Javascript 2.0. It really is amazing.

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