Web interoperability is producing web pages viewable with nearly every device and

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. There have been various projects to improve web interoperability, for example the

Web Standards Project The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies. Foun ...

, Mozilla's Technology Evangelism and Web Standards Group, and the Web Essential Conference.

History

The term was first used in the Web Interoperability Pledge, which is a promise to adhere to current

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

recommendations as promoted by the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working t ...

(W3C). The WIP was not a W3C initiative but it was started by and has been run by

ZDNet ZDNET is a business technology news website owned and operated by Red Ventures. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991, as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication. H ...

AnchorDesk. This issue was known as "cross browsing" in the

browser war Browse, browser or browsing may refer to: Programs *Web browser, a program used to access the World Wide Web *Code browser, a program for navigating source code *File browser or file manager, a program used to manage files and related objects * H ...

between

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

and

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

. Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the dominant browser after that, but modern web browsers such as

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current a ...

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libre ...

and

Safari A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...

have become dominant, and support additional web standards beyond what Internet Explorer supports. Because of Internet Explorer's

backwards compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially i ...

, some web pages have continued to use non-standard HTML tags, DOM handling scripts, and platform-specific technologies such as

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide Web. ...

, which could potentially be harmful for

Web accessibility Web accessibility, or eAccessibility,European CommissionCommunication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament and the , European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: eAccessibility, EC(2005)1095 pub ...

and

device independence In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

Elements

* Structural and semantic markup with

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...

-based layout with layout elements that resize based on screen size

References

{{reflist Web design Interoperability

History

Elements

See also

References