There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
ISO 8601 date format. Not because it’s from a standards body, but because it’s simple, sensible, clearly defined, easy to recognize, and very effective.
Date field placement in any order other than most-significant-digits-first is not only counterintuitive, but needlessly complicated to work with. Omitting critical information like the century is ambiguous and confusing.
We don’t live in isolated villages any more. Mixing and matching those problems by accepting all the world’s various regional and personal date styles, especially with no reliable indication of which ones apply in any given case, leads to the hodgepodge of error-prone date madness that we have today.
The 2024-09-02 format should be taught in schools and required in official documents. Let the antiquated date styles fall into disuse outside of art and personal correspondence, like cursive writing.
I wish standards were always open access. Not behind a 600 dollar paywall.
When it is paywalled I’m irritated it’s even called a standard.
I’ll give my usual contribution to RSS feed discourse, which is that, news flash! RSS feeds support video!
It drives me crazy when podcasters are like, “thanks for listening to our audio podcasts. We also have a video feed for our YouTube subscribers.” Just let me have the video in PocketCasts please!
IPv6. Stop engineering IoT junk on single-stack IPv4, you dipshits.
Ogg Opus. It’s superior to everything in every way. It’s free and there is absolutely no reason to not support it. It blows my mind that MPEG 1.0 Layer III is still so dominant.
ActivityPub :) People spend an incredible amount of time on social media—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and YouTube—so it’d be nice to liberate that.
PGP or GPG, however you spell it. You can encrypt stuff, protect your email from prying eyes!
Also FOSS in general.
TOML instead of YAML or JSON for configuration.
YAML is complex and has security concerns most people are not aware of.
JSON works, but the block quoting and indenting is a lot of noise for a simple category key value format.
TOML is not a very good format IMO. It’s fine for very simple config structures, but as soon as you have any level of nesting at all it becomes an unobvious mess. Worse than YAML even.
What is this even?
[[fruits]] name = "apple" [fruits.physical] color = "red" shape = "round" [[fruits.varieties]] name = "red delicious" [[fruits.varieties]] name = "granny smith" [[fruits]] name = "banana" [[fruits.varieties]] name = "plantain"That’s an example from the docs, and I have literally no idea what structure it makes. Compare to the JSON which is far more obvious:
{ "fruits": [ { "name": "apple", "physical": { "color": "red", "shape": "round" }, "varieties": [ { "name": "red delicious" }, { "name": "granny smith" } ] }, { "name": "banana", "varieties": [ { "name": "plantain" } ] } ] }The fact that they have to explain the structure by showing you the corresponding JSON says a lot.
JSON5 is much better IMO. Unfortunately it isn’t as popular and doesn’t have as much ecosystem support.
