What Is a NonStandard Description?
In many fieldsprogramming, documentation, cataloguing, or even everyday conversationa description is expected to follow a set of conventions or standards. A nonstandard description is any narrative, label, or annotation that deliberately deviates from those conventions. The deviation can be stylistic, structural, or semantic, and it often serves a specific purpose: to convey nuance, to bypass limits imposed by a rigid format, or simply to experiment with language.
Why Use NonStandard Descriptions?
The motivations behind breaking the rules are as varied as the contexts in which they appear. Some common reasons include:
- Expressiveness: Standard forms can feel restrictive; a more creative description may capture emotion or atmosphere better.
- Technical Necessity: Certain data structures or APIs lack fields for needed information, prompting developers to store details in a freeform text block.
- Accessibility: An unconventional description might be easier for a specific audience to understand, especially when dealing with crosscultural or interdisciplinary material.
- Security & Privacy: Obscuring details through nonstandard phrasing can reduce the risk of accidental data leakage.
- Innovation: Experimentation drives progress; new description patterns can later become standards themselves.
Examples Across Disciplines
Software Development
In code comments, developers sometimes embed TODO notes using emojis, hashtags, or unique tags such as #FIXME. These are nonstandard because they are not part of the languages official documentation syntax, yet tools can be built to recognise them.
Another example is the use of magic strings in configuration files. Instead of following a prescribed JSON schema, a project might store arbitrary keyvalue pairs in a single string, like meta:author=John;version=2.1;beta. The format is nonstandard, but it conveys useful metadata without altering the underlying schema.
Library Catalogues
Traditional library catalogues rely on MARC records, which have strict fields for title, author, and subject. Some modern collections, however, add freeform annotation fields where curators write personal reflections or contextual stories. These annotations are nonstandard because they do not map to any MARC subfield, yet they enhance the user experience.
Marketing & Ecommerce
Product listings usually follow a template: bullet points, specifications, dimensions. Brands trying to stand out may write a narrative story about the product, describing the journey of its creation or the emotions it evokes. While this violates the usual template, it can improve conversion rates.
Academic Writing
Some scholars employ nonstandard abstracts that combine a brief summary with a tweetstyle hook or a visual diagram embedded directly in the abstract. Such abstracts break the convention of plain text but attract readership in interdisciplinary journals.
Risks and Challenges
Although nonstandard descriptions can be powerful, they introduce several pitfalls:
- Parsing Difficulty: Automated systems may fail to extract useful information, leading to data loss.
- Inconsistency: When multiple authors use different styles, comparison becomes hard.
- Maintenance Overhead: Future editors might not understand the intention behind a bespoke format.
- Compliance Issues: Certain industries (e.g., healthcare, finance) have regulatory requirements that mandate standardized documentation.
Best Practices for Managing NonStandard Descriptions
To reap the benefits while mitigating drawbacks, consider the following guidelines:
- Document the Deviation: Provide a short guide explaining the format, placeholders, and intended audience.
- Keep It Optional: Offer a standard field alongside the nonstandard one so that downstream processes have a fallback.
- Validate When Possible: Use custom validators or linting scripts to catch syntactic errors.
- Version Control: Treat the description schema as codetrack changes, review pull requests, and test parsing logic.
- Evaluate Impact Regularly: Measure how often the nonstandard content is accessed or parsed correctly, and adjust accordingly.
When to Stick to Standards
Not every situation warrants a nonstandard approach. In highvolume data pipelines, in regulated environments, or when interoperability with thirdparty systems is essential, adhering to established standards ensures reliability and reduces integration effort.
Future Trends
The line between standard and nonstandard is blurring. Machinelearning models trained on large corpora can interpret many irregular patterns, turning todays quirks into tomorrows acceptable inputs. At the same time, new standards are being drafted to incorporate flexible fields (e.g., JSONLD for linked data), acknowledging that rigidity alone cannot serve all usecases.
In short, nonstandard descriptions are a creative response to the limits of formal schemas. Used thoughtfully, they enrich communication, preserve nuance, and occasionally forge the next generation of standards.
For further reading, explore resources such as the JSONLD 1.1 specification, the NISO Z39.84 standard for multimedia description, and articles on semantic versioning and its extensions.
