Web Standards

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 trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a 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.


 

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)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international industry consortium dedicated to “leading the Web to its full potential“. It’s led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. Founded in 1994, the W3C has more than 450 member organizations – including Microsoft, America Online (parent company of Netscape Communications), Apple Inc., Adobe, Sun Microsystems, and a variety of other hardware and software manufacturers, content providers, academic institutions, and telecommunications companies. The Consortium is hosted by three research institutions – MIT in the US, INRIA in Europe, and Keio University in Japan.

ECMA Standards

 

        What is the ECMA?

The European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) is an organization officially founded in 1961 in order to meet the need for standardizing computer operational formats, including programming languages and input/output codes.
The ECMA is based in Geneva, Switzerland, near the headquarters of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). In 1994, the organization’s name was changed to the ECMA – European Association for Standardizing Information and Communication Systems, in order to reflect its broader range of activities.

What does it do?

The main role of the ECMA is to develop Standards and Technical Reports in the area of information and communication technology. As ECMA is an association of companies and not an official standardization institute, they often collaborate with official national or international institutes.

ECMA Standards have been accepted as a base for international and European standards. So far more than 270 ECMA Standards and 70 Technical Reports have been published.

 Of these standards 85 have been accepted as international standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In addition, 25 have been accepted as European standards by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

 Conclusions:

Web standards are not arcane laws decreed by ivory-tower organizations. The standards are for the most part decided by representatives of the same people who use them — browser makers, web developers, content providers, and other organizations.

Writing web pages in accordance with the standards shortens site development time and makes pages easier to maintain. Debugging and troubleshooting become easier, because the code follows a standard. No longer do you have to worry about the coding and maintenance for several versions of code that are supposed to accomplish the same presentation. 

The universal adoption of web standards is becoming of paramount importance. The mission of The Web Standards Project is to make the Web a better place, for developers and for end-users, by encouraging browser and web page editor makers to follow the standards in their applications.

This effort will be greatly helped when web developers use the standards as a matter of course, and insist that generators and renderers of their code comply with the standards.