Web Standards - Overview

Overview

Web standards include many interdependent standards and specifications, some of which govern aspects of the Internet, 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 services. Considerations include the interoperability, accessibility and usability of web pages and web sites.

Web standards, in the broader sense, consist of the following:

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

Web standards are not fixed sets of rules, but are a constantly evolving set of finalized technical specifications of web technologies. Web standards are developed by standards organizations—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 specifications, the highest maturity level).