Standards is a Plural Word

Planning for cross-platform compatability

You're shopping for software that "must be compatable with (this or that version of) some standard".

Standards change. In reality, computer standards are more suggestions than rules, and in many cases you need only adopt a small sub-set of the standards feature set to accomplish compatability.

With computer, and especially online standards changing faster than you can read this article, it wise to carefully weigh the benefits of adapting a new standard over the potential drawbacks.

An easy example is HTML. Take a quote from the w3.org about HTML "standards"-


HTML 3....An extended version of HTML+...submitted as Internet Draft (1994)...Like HTML+, it was never standardized, but helped to stimulate further work on features such as tables and math.

- w3.org - Markup Language History


The simple fact is most people do not use 1/10th of the available features in HTML. Those that live on the bleeding edge of technology reduce themselves to a very small percentage of early adapter end users.