Web standards

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the web standards movement: a growing trend of endorsement of a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a broader philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

Many interdependent standards and specifications, some of which govern aspects of the Internet, not just the World Wide Web, directly or indirectly affect the development and administration of web sites and web services. While any of these may be called "web standards", advocates within the web standards movement tend to focus on the higher-level standards that most directly affect the accessibility and usability of web sites. Web standards, in the broader sense, consist of the following:

Various Recommendations published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Various Internet standard (STD) documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Various Request for Comments (RFC) documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force
Various Standards published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
Various Standards published by Ecma International (formerly ECMA)
The Unicode Standard and various Unicode Technical Reports (UTRs) published by the Unicode Consortium
Various name and number registries maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

[edit] Common usage

Usually, when Web standards are discussed, the following standards are seen as foundational:

Recommendations for markup languages, .e.g. HTML and XHTML, from W3C.
Recommendations for stylesheets, i.e. CSS, from W3C.
Standards for Ecmascript a.k.a. JavaScript, from Ecma International.
Recommendations for the Document Object Model, from W3C.

Web Standards advocates, a.k.a. standardistas, often refer to the recommendations from W3C as "standards"^{[citation needed]}. The W3C does confirm that usage, stating that a "recommendation" by them equals a "standard" from another organization.