What's Wrong With The ACORD XML Standard?

Many dedicated, intelligent people have donated their time and expertise to the development of the ACORD XML Standard for Property and Casualty Insurance. A good XML standard is sorely needed in this industry, and those who worked on the standard deserve the gratitude of everyone who earns their living in the Property and Casualty Insurance business.

So why hasn't this standard been more widely adopted?

It may be because of the Law of Standards first described by John Sowa in 1991. I came across the link to this Law via Sean McGrath.

Mr. Sowa states:

Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.

...the overwhelming majority of successful standards are clarifications and revisions of interfaces that have proved to be effective without the support of a major standards body. What has consistently failed are the "proactive" attempts to design new systems from scratch that are declared to be standard before anyone has had a chance to implement them, test them, use them, and live with them. Some new systems succeed, but most fail, and even the most successful go through several iterations before the best configuration is found. Such design iterations are best done in small research projects, not in large public committees.

Mr. Sowa lists several well known standards to illustrate this law. A few from his list:

• COBOL became the de-facto standard for business programming - instead of PL/I


• PASCAL became the de-facto standard for Academic programming - instead of Algol


• C became the de-facto standard for system programming - instead of ADA

Tim Bray's experience appears to provide further evidence of the validity of Mr. Sowa's Law of Standards:

...I’ve been convinced that standards organizations shouldn’t try to invent technology. (The W3C, which is jam-packed with super-smart people, has produced some horrible, damaging standards when they’ve tried to get too inventive.) The right role for a standards body is to wait till the implementors have deployed things and worked out the hard bits, then write down the consensus on what works and what doesn’t.

According to Mr. Sowa's observations, the work done by the ACORD XML committee was certainly not wasted. But it's main function may be to provide scaffolding and food for thought for someone to actually implement a similar but simpler design.

So...one could infer that the ACORD XML standard is very likely to result in the widespread adoption of some simpler de-facto standard....


I wonder who will be the first to "Just-Do-It"