Why have so many standards emerged for electronic commerce?
One of the issues here is what a standard is. That is one of the most abused words in the language and people like you (in the media) do not help by calling things standard that are not standards. Very few things are really standard. Standards come out of standards organizations, and there are very few of those in the world. There is ANSI (American National Standards Institute), there is ISO (International Organization for Standardization), the United Nations. Things like OASIS and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) are not standards organizations. They create specifications that occasionally have some amount of consensus. But it is the marketing term to call things standard these days. So what’s an actual standards organization? Well, a standards organization is something that is chartered to be a standards body that has some standard procedures?To me, a standard, in the best case, is some kind of specification which is developed
