Standards vs Software

Generally speaking, it seems that when it comes to technology that involves formatting, there are two basic ways to go about streamlining.

First, and this is really the better option: adopt a standard. This is what happened with CD-ROMs, VHS, DVD (professional), and what we expect will happen with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and, eventually, digital music files.

But the other way to handle things is just to throw a bunch of software at it.

Region encoding exists (stupidly) to prevent people on different continents from watching the same media. Throw software at it, smooths it all out, makes it play everywhere.

E-mail is a mess. Basically every e-mail program and service has their own formatting rules, there’s RTF, plain text, microsoft enhanced whatchamacallit, etc, etc. So the solution is for each individual e-mail program to be robust enough to take what’s coming in and process it all so it looks pretty on your screen.

Seems pretty inefficient, doesn’t it?