Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Adopting Open Standards

You can identify users on various sites throughout the Web in many ways, and if you're going to embrace all of them, it can be a lot of work! Having to rewrite new code for each platform you write for can be a time-consuming process that is frustrating for the developer. After all, you're essentially authorizing users for each Web site you connect to — you just have to do it in a different way for each one!

In order to save effort, Facebook is trying to embrace open standards. A Web standard, or open standard, is an established practice of architecting your software so that whatever you implement on your site is done in the same way that other sites throughout the Web are doing it.

For example, sites like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all embracing standards that interoperate so that you, the developer, don't have to reinvent the wheel designing new APIs for each one. Protocols like HTML or HTTP are standards that are understood by Web browsers and Web servers no matter what browser or Web server reads them. You, the developer, only have to write once (ideally), and it works on all of them.

The frustration of standards incompliance

You may have built a Web site before, and while it may work on Firefox, it doesn't work on Internet Explorer. Or, perhaps you have a camera that takes a normal SD Card, and you buy a Sony device that requires its proprietary storage. This lack of compliance to standard technologies causes frustration among both developers ...