Thanks to fuzzy math in the analytics community, it will take years to create proper, precise standards that can be implemented industry-wide. Here's why.
In my
last article, I made reference to some definitions in web analytics standards and was criticized by a number of people who said I had ignored what was in the International Web Analytics Association's (WAA) standard. They were right. The reason why I ignored the WAA standard is because I don't consider it to be a standard. To be a standard, something must be either rigorously precise or in widespread use. The WAA document is neither.
One of the world's leading standards bodies is the British Standards Institute (BSI), whose standards are used in the majority of countries in the world, including the U.S. The BSI's
definition of a standard states that to be a standard, a document should contain "a technical specification or other precise criteria designed to be used consistently." The WAA document is anything but precise.
Web technology is a branch of computing science, which is a branch of engineering. All computing standards can be reduced to precise engineering specifications, which can themselves be reduced to mathematical equations in physics.
If you wanted to, you could express a computing standard, such as HTTP, in terms of the mathematical formulas of the raw sub-atomic physics occurring within the electronic components of a computer. If the WAA standard was following this model, it would provide precise definitions. For example, it would be able to say that a "visit" consists of a series of "page requests" for combinations of specified types of files. The standard would then define a "page request" as a specific type of HTTP GET request. We could then refer to the standard for HTTP if we wanted to break this down further.
HTTP GET is defined in the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) standard for HTTP 1.1, RFC 2616. The communications between browser and web server contained within RFC 2616 can be defined in terms of the standard for TCP/IP, which is RFC 1122, and so on, all the way down to the pure math of sub-atomic physics.
Next page >>