Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary
standards Standard may refer to:
Symbols
* Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs
* Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification
Norms, conventions or requirements
* Standard (metrology), an object t ...
and other technical
specification
A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard.
There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...
s that define and describe aspects of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized
best practices
A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to alternatives because it tends to produce superior results. Best practices are used to achieve quality as an alternative to mandatory standards. Best practice ...
for building
web site
A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, ...
s, and a philosophy of
web design
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...
and development that includes those methods.
Overview
Web standards include many interdependent standards and specifications, some of which govern aspects of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
, not just the World Wide Web. Even when not web-focused, such standards directly or indirectly affect the development and administration of web sites and
web service
A web service (WS) is either:
* a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or
* a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...
s. Considerations include the
interoperability
Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...
,
accessibility and
usability
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a softw ...
of web pages and web sites.
Web standards consist of the following:
* Recommendations published 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 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
(W3C), such as
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
/
XHTML
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages which mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated.
While HTML, pr ...
,
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), image formats such as
Portable Network Graphics
Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster graphics, raster-graphics file graphics file format, format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented ...
(PNG) and
Scalable Vector Graphics
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector graphics format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sin ...
(SVG), as well as accessibility technologies like
WAI-ARIA
* Standards and "Living standards" published by the
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, l ...
(WHATWG), such as the
HTML Living Standard
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ...
,
DOM Standard,
Encoding Standard and
URL Standard.
* Standards published by
Ecma International
Ecma International () is a Nonprofit organization, nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to ...
(formerly ECMA) such as
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
(also known as ''ECMAScript'') and
JavaScript Object Notation
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of name–value pairs and arrays (or other serializ ...
(JSON)
* Standards published by the
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
M ...
(ISO), such as
JPEG
JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
More broadly, the following technologies may be referred to as "web standards" as well:
*
Request for Comments
A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or ...
(RFC) documents published by the
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...
(IETF)
* The
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard and various Unicode Technical Reports (UTRs) published by the
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...
* Name and number registries maintained by the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, Autonomous system (Internet), autonomous system number allocation, DNS root zone, root zone management in the Domain Name Syste ...
(IANA)
Web standards are evolving specifications of web technologies. Web standards are developed by
standards organization
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...
s—groups of interested and often competing parties chartered with the task of standardization—not technologies developed and declared to be a standard by a single individual or company. It is crucial to distinguish those specifications that are under development from the ones that already reached the final development status (in case of
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
specifications, the highest maturity level).
The web standards movement
The earliest visible manifestation of the web standards movement was the
Web Standards Project, launched in August 1998 as a grassroots coalition fighting for improved web standards support in browsers.
The web standards movement supports concepts of standards-based web design, including the separation of document structure from a web page or application's appearance and behavior; an emphasis on semantically structured content that validates (that is, contains no errors of structural composition) when tested against validation software maintained 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 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
; and
progressive enhancement
Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, while users with additional browser features or faster Internet access r ...
, a layered approach to web page and application creation that enables all people and devices to access the content and functionality of a page, regardless of personal physical ability (accessibility), connection speed, and browser capability.
Prior to the web standards movement, many web page developers used invalid, incorrect HTML syntax such as "table layouts" and "spacer" GIF images to create web pages — an approach often referred to as "
tag soup". Such pages sought to look the same in all browsers of a certain age (such as
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a retired series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating ...
4 and
Netscape Navigator
The 1990s releases of the Netscape (web browser), Netscape line referred to as Netscape Navigator were a series of now discontinued web browsers. from versions 1 to 4.08. It was the Core product, flagship product of the Netscape, Netscape Comm ...
4), but were often inaccessible to people with disabilities. Tag soup pages also displayed or operated incorrectly in older browsers, and required code forks such as
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
for
Netscape Navigator
The 1990s releases of the Netscape (web browser), Netscape line referred to as Netscape Navigator were a series of now discontinued web browsers. from versions 1 to 4.08. It was the Core product, flagship product of the Netscape, Netscape Comm ...
and JScript for
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...
that added to the cost and complexity of development. The extra code required, and the lack of a caching page layout language, made web sites "heavy" in terms of bandwidth, as did the frequent use of images as text. These bandwidth requirements were burdensome to users in developing countries, rural areas, and wherever fast Internet connections were unavailable.
The Web Standards movement pioneered by
Glenn Davis, George Olsen,
Jeffrey Zeldman, Steven Champeon, Todd Fahrner,
Eric A. Meyer,
Tantek Çelik
Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American computer scientist, currently the Web standards lead at Mozilla Corporation. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at Technorati. He worked on microformats and is one of the principal editors of seve ...
, Dori Smith,
Tim Bray
Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 w ...
, Jeffrey Veen, and other members of the Web Standards Project replaced bandwidth-heavy
tag soup with light, semantic markup and
progressive enhancement
Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, while users with additional browser features or faster Internet access r ...
, with the goal of making web content "accessible to all".
The Web Standards movement declared that
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
,
CSS, and
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
were more than simply interesting technologies. "They are a way of creating Web pages that will facilitate the twin goals of sophisticated and appropriate presentation and widespread accessibility."
The group succeeded in persuading
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 o ...
,
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
, and other browser makers to support these standards in their browsers. It then set about promoting these standards to designers, who were still using
tag soup,
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...
, and other proprietary technologies to create web pages.
In 2007, Douglas Vos initiated the
Blue Beanie Day, inspired by Jeffrey Zeldman, who is shown with a blue cap on the book cover of his 2003 book ''Designing with Web Standards''. Since then, the
30 November
Events Pre-1600
* 978 – Franco-German war of 978–980: Holy Roman Emperor Otto II lifts the siege of Paris and withdraws.
1601–1900
*1707 – Queen Anne's War: The second Siege of Pensacola comes to end with the failure of t ...
is the annual international celebration of web standards and
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 pu ...
.
Common usage
When a web site or web page is described as complying with web standards, it usually means that the site or page has valid
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
,
CSS and
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
. The HTML should also meet
accessibility and
semantic
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
guidelines. Full standard compliance also covers proper settings for
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...
, valid
RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...
or valid
Atom
Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...
news feed, valid
RDF, valid
metadata
Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive ...
, valid
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
, valid object embedding, valid script embedding, browser- and resolution-independent codes, and proper server settings.
When web standards are discussed, the following publications are typically seen as foundational:
* Recommendations for
markup language
A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...
s, such as Hypertext Markup Language (
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
), Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (
XHTML
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages which mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated.
While HTML, pr ...
), and Scalable Vector Graphics (
SVG) from W3C.
* Recommendations for
stylesheets, especially Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), from W3C.
* Standards for
ECMAScript
ECMAScript (; ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is stan ...
, more commonly JavaScript, from Ecma International.
* Recommendations for Document Object Models (
DOM), from W3C.
* Properly formed names and addresses for the page and all other resources referenced from it (
URIs), based upon
RFC 2396, from IETF.
* Proper use of
HTTP
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...
and
MIME
A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...
to deliver the page, return data from it and to request other resources referenced in it, based on
RFC 2616, from IETF.
Web accessibility is normally based upon the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web for people with disabilities. People with disabilities encounter difficulties when using computers generally, ...
.
Work in the W3C toward the
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
To enable the encoding o ...
is currently focused by publications related to the
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and formats, of whi ...
(RDF),
Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) and
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of Knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...
(OWL).
Standards publications and bodies
A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director.
An IETF Internet Standard is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a number in the IETF STD series while retaining its original IETF RFC number.
Non-standard and vendor-proprietary pressures
HTML 5 contains numerous "willful violations" of other specifications, in order to accommodate limitations of existing platforms.
Web Standards Compliance Testing
There are compliance tests both for HTML code generated by websites as well as for the faithful interpretation of HTML code by web browsers.
Compliance tests for website code
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
offers online services to test websites directly for both web site developers, as well as for website users. These include:
Markup Validation Serviceto check the markup (HTML, XHTML, ...) of Web documents
CSS Validation Serviceto check Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets
Compliance tests for web browsers
The
Web Standards Project (WaSP), although development is officially ''inactive'', continues to offer two levels of testing services for web browsers:
Acid2 Browser Test
See also
*
Acid3
* ''
Designing with Web Standards''
*
Open Web Foundation (OWF)
*
Responsive web design
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfactio ...
(RWD)
*
W3C Markup Validation Service
The Markup Validation Service is a validator by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows Internet users to check pre-HTML5 HTML and XHTML documents for Well-formed element, well-formed markup against a document type definition (DTD). Marku ...
*
WebPlatform.org
*
Web Standards Project
References
External links
W3C homepageThe Internet Engineering Task Force
{{Web interfaces