What Are They?

Just as standard exist in many industries, there exists a free and non-proprietary set of standards for designing and deploying web sites. Web standards assure that the different components that make up the internet – your computer, the web server, your PDA, your friend’s cell phone – communicate in a way the each one has the same understanding of the information being transmitted. Although there are standards that apply to many aspects of the Internet, what most people are referring to when they speak of web standards is HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-Up Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Like a grammar book for the English language, the standards specifications for HTML and CSS describe how to write web pages using those languages.

Web pages used to be coded in HTML that included both the content and the presentation of the page. Web standards separate the content (headlines, paragraphs, lists, block quotes, images) from its presentation (fonts, colors, placement). This allows easy change to either the content or the presentation without conflict with the other. For example, one can easily change the font used throughout the page, or for just one section on the style sheet without ever touching the content.

Web standards are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international industry consortium led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, is dedicated to “leading the Web to its full potential“. Founded in 1994, the W3C has more than 450 member organizations - including major computer and telecommunications companies including Microsoft, America Online (parent company of Netscape Communications), Apple Computer, Adobe, Macromedia, Sun Microsystems,. The Consortium is hosted by three research institutions - MIT in the US, INRIA in Europe, and Keio University in Japan.

For More Information:

The Web Standards Project- FAQ

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)