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.

The term open-standard does not cut it. People should start using “publicly available and sharable” instead (maybe there is a better name for it).

ISO standards for example are technically “open”. But how relevant is that to a curious individual developer when anything you need to implement would require access to multiple “open” standards, each coming with a (monetary) price, with some extra shenanigans ^[archived] on top.

IETF standards however are actually truly open, as in publicly available and sharable.

I wish there was a good open standard for task management or todo list.

I know there’s todo.txt, but it lacks features like dependent tasks, and overall the plain text format limits features and implementations.

It’s completely bonkers that JPEG-XL is as good as it is and no one wants to actually implement it into web browsers

Zigbee or really any Bluetooth alternative.

Bluetooth is a poorly engineered protocol. It jumps around the spectrum while transmitting, which makes it difficult and power intensive for bluetooth receivers to track.

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!

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.

IRC.

Jabber.

IPFS.

ISO 216 paper sizes work like this: https://www.printed.com/blog/paper-size-guide/

It’s so fucking neat and intuitive! How is it not used more???

PGP or GPG, however you spell it. You can encrypt stuff, protect your email from prying eyes!

Also FOSS in general.

JSON5. it’s basically just JSON with several QoL improvements, like comments, that make it usable as a format for human consumption (as opposed to a serialization format).

i’m a plan 9 from bell labs fan. Imagine how excited I was when wsl used 9P for its plumbing. then they scrapped it all for wsl2.

just, the power they managed to get out of those union mounts… your application wants access to the mouse? sure, here’s a file named “mouse”. it’s got the coordinates in it. you want to draw to the screen? here’s a file called like “bitmap” or whatever, just write to it. you want to start a process on another machine? just cd to it and start the process there. want to have the UI show up on your machine? symlink your bitmap file to that directory.

I also wish early web composability could have stayed and expanded. like, the old vlc embed player, which would just show up in your browser and could play any file inline? great stuff. Imagine if every application composed with everything else, like the android Activity and Intent concepts but for anything, just by virtue of living in the same os. need an image? just ask the os and it will present the user with many ways to procure an image, let the selected one run , and hand you back an image. you don’t even have to care where from. in a way, it’s what the arcan guy is doing with his experiments, although that’s more for stitching together graphical pipelines.

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.