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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. While any of these may be called “web standards,” advocates within the web standards movement tend to focus on the higher-level standards that most directly affect the accessibility and usability of 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).
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 or nearly valid HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The HTML should also meet accessibility and semantic guidelines.
When web standards are discussed, the following segments are typically seen:
- Recommendations for markup languages, such as HTML, XHTML, SVG, and XForms,
- Recommendations for stylesheets, especially CSS,
- Standards for ECMAScript, most commonly JavaScript,
- Recommendations for Document Object Models,
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