But if you want interoperability, you need "generalisation" to the
degree that "(nearly) everybody has to agree". And that is the
fundamental problem.
If 5 people decide the right answer and try to make the other 400
agree, it may work or it may not, depending on the politics and trust.
But surely after twenty years we know what the general problems
are?? There must be someone out there in standards land
who could describe an unambiguous pathology request/response
for Australian environments that satisfied 95% of users.
From my experience, standards that try to satisfy 100% of people
end up satisfying noone - those that aim to do well for 95%
of the people, and yet don't piss the other 5% off (i.e. by
allowing them to do their strange 5% things through
generic extension mechanisms etc) seem to succeed..
I often think of other standards when I look at health -
TIFF was the huge grand imaging specification that supported
everything for everyone - except it was virtually impossible to
implement so in the end it lost out to nimbler more focused
formats like JPEG and PNG. SGML was the grand completely
general markup language - yet HTML succeeded because
it solved a majority of problems for the majority of users (and
was implementable) (though don't take this as an admiration for
HTML as a standard - noone should have to live through
a browser standards war ever again).
Andrew
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