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 use the term selectively to refer only to the higher-level standards that most directly affect the usability of web sites in popular web browsers. There is no canonical list of these standards, because web developers have varying needs and areas of interest, but web standards, in general, consist of the following:
- Various Recommendations (open specifications, many of which are de facto standards) 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)
External Links
 | This World Wide Web–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |