Cowtrails and standards

Comparing these two, the first thing you'd notice is that cowtrails are easier to follow... while standards give a sound base.

If you have to implement a service which conforms to a standard though, you need to have something readable, and standards, while normally explicit, don't necessarily go into much detail about the philosophy or thought processes behind them. I suppose there's the expectation that, if you're reading this standard, you're already "there".

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I found, despite comments like "you don't want to know WTF we were thinking" that getting some idea of these thought processes was useful. Admittedly, my experience is limited, and I've heard various comments about the Z39.88-2004 being over-engineered... but once I saw some of the stuff by Jeff Young on his Q6 blog, OpenURL 1.0 made sense.