While the rollers on washing machines (how old are you Manny ?) and Printing presses may be the same, they are worked somewhat different by different types of people (or were anyway) under different types of circumstances. Therefore, a one size fits all approach, might result in disasters.
However, I don't believe that with the exponential explosion of different technologies, we can continue to produce "specific" requirements as new inventions come along, in a timely manner. The standards will be outdated before they can be written. Either the standards become irrelevant because they are not adhered to, or they will inhibit innnovation. The EU approach, to produce directives that provide the "essential" requirements and assume compliance with those essential requirements where conformity to harmonised standards is claimed, to me appears imminently sensible. It provides the best of all worlds, a method to determine safety where there is no standard (yet) and a method to do so efficiently, where there is a harmonized standard. It might even help convince committee members that have a penchant for going down ratholes, trying to reach agreement on harmonised documents. Ciao, Vic Boersma
