Contingent conformance to standards

An implementation of the CCITT X.400 message handling system recommendation for production use was produced, as well as a restricted-subset implementation of the ISO standard generalized markup language as a platform for computer science and literary research. Based on these experiences, it is argued that standards efforts should be carried out in close collaboration with basic computer science research, and should allow explicit subsetting of requirements, since both of these would lead to reduced cost and risk and thus more rapid and widespread acceptance of standards