The Standards Of The World Wide Web

By Author: Manish Jain
Total Articles: 35
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A great sea change has taken place in web development in the last six or seven years. Standards compliance is the name of the game in web design these days. After years of browser competition, HTML hacking, and other practices born out of the lack of guiding principles, we are all finally recognizing the benefits of abiding by the rules. That means using clean and logical HTML or XHTML for marking up content, Cascading Style Sheets for all matters of presentation, and a single Document Object Model for scripting.

We are still in a period of transition. New approaches need to be learned; old habits need to be shaken. Eventually, standards-based design will be second nature. The good news is that the developers of the tools we use to view and create web pages are making strides toward full standards support. With everyone on the same page, eb production has the potential to be more efficient, less costly and forward compatible.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) creates and oversees the development of web technologies, including XML, HTML, and their numerous applications. They also keep their eye on higher-level ...
... issues such as making content accessible to the greatest number of devices and users, as well as laying a common foundation for future development, thus making web content 'forward compatible'.

The W3C is not an official standards body, but rather a joint effort by experts in web-related fields to bring order to the development of web technologies. The W3C releases its final word on how various tasks (such as HTML markup) should be handled in documents called Recommendations. Most of their recommendations become the de facto standards for web development. There are other standards bodies such as ANSI, Ecma, IETF, ISO and Unicode that also affect the Web and the Internet at large.

Because the Internet isn't owned and operated by one person or company, decisions regarding how best to accomplish tasks have traditionally been made by a cooperative effort of invention, discussion, and finally adoption of the way to handle a particular task.

Since even before the Web, Internet standards such as protocols, naming systems, and other networking technologies have been managed by the IETF. The process begins when a need for functionality is identified (email attachments, for example) and a person or group proposes a system to make it work. After a discussion phase, the proposal is made public in the form of an RFC. Once the kinks are worked out and agreed upon, the technology becomes the standard. This, of course, is a greatly simplified explanation. If you are interested in learning more about the standards approval process or in finding out what new technologies are currently in development, the IETF site provides an excellent overview.

The Web was subject to the same development process as any other Internet protocol. The problem was that the explosion of excitement and opportunism of the early Web caused the development of HTML and other technologies to outpace the traditional rate of standards approval. So while the W3C began working on HTML standards in 1994, the browser software companies didn't wait for them and came up with their own set of proprietary HTML tags that vastly improved the appearance of web pages.

But it didn't take long for the development community to say, "Enough is enough!" and demand that browser creators slow down and abide by the Recommendations set forth by the W3C. The champion of this effort is the Web Standards Project, a collective of web developers established in 1998. They pushed hard on the browser developers, tool developers, and the design community to get on the same page. Their actions seem to be paying off, as over the past several years, the standards effort has certainly gained steam. The advantages of Standards are Accessibility, Forward Compatibility, Simpler & faster development and Faster download & display.

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