2019 Guide to the Role of Web Standards

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What Are Web Standards?

Web standards correspond to the sets of rules and guidelines that are developed in order to encourage consistency across all web pages [1]. These web standards are developed by standards organisations, which correspond to organisations that focus on developing and maintaining technical standards that are aimed to address the needs of a specific group [2]. In this case, the standards organisations in question aim at setting standard practices and sets of guidelines and rules to be taken into account by browser makers when developing their web browsers, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, and to be followed by designers who are creating websites to be viewed on those web browsers.

According to the Web Standards Project’s mission, web standards are a way of creating Web pages that will facilitate the twin goals of sophisticated and appropriate presentation and widespread accessibility [3]. Indeed, if every organisation released web pages on the World Wide Web with their own versions and standards of markup, then there would be great inconsistency between the structure behind each web page and how they are displayed in different web browsers. Therefore, the ultimate goal is to provide compatibility and a general agreement across the entire World Wide Web. However, this was not always the case…


The Evolution of the Web Standards Movement

Prior to 1998, the majority of HTML used in web pages corresponded to tag soup, a term used to describe syntactically incorrect HTML [4]. An example of tag soup compared to clean HTML code can be see in Figure 1. On top of being invalid, these poorly designed web pages were not adapted to people with disabilities and did not operate correctly on older versions of web browsers, requiring additional code to be written in order to make these web pages accessible on all browser versions. Unsurprisingly, the extra code led to a negative domino effect causing these web pages to be too heavy in terms of bandwidth required, hence making it even harder to access them from regions with poor Internet connections such as developing countries and rural areas.

HTML code comparison between tag soup and clean code.
Figure 1: A comparison of HTML tag-soup to the left and clean HTML code to the right.

Therefore, the WaSP (Web Standards Project) set to fix these urging issues back in 1998, which corresponds to the first trace of the web standards movement. The organisation’s original mission goal, which fundamentally remains unchanged up until today, is to fight for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web [5]. They planned to do so by replacing the bandwidth-heavy tag soup code with light markup instead. For example, web browsers in the late 1990s each used their own markup and standards, resulting in very different and incompatible browsers, as shown in Figure 2. The WaSP succeeded in doing so by persuading technology giants such as Microsoft and Netscape to develop their web browsers according to HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards [6], before persuading designers still using tag soup to adopt these standards when creating their web pages.

Comparison depicting the difference between browsers in the late 1990s.
Figure 2: A depiction of the differences between web browsers from the late 1990s, with Internet Explorer on the left, Netscape in the middle, and Mozilla on the right.

Web Standards Organisations Nowadays

The web standards in use nowadays originate from multiple different standards organisations. However, one organisation handles the majority of standards used nowadays: the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) [7]. The W3C has published the majority of standards that define de World Wide Web as we know it, including standards such as HTML, XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DOM (Document Object Model), PNG (Portable Network Graphics), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and many more. All of their published standards can be found online at the URI: www.w3.org/TR/?status=rec&version=latest, with a total of 293 standards still relevant to this date (October 2019). The most important standards are explored in more detail in the Popular Web Standards section.

The W3C is not the only standards organisation that standardises web technologies. Other important standards organisations include Ecma International (European Computer Manufacturers Association), which handles the JavaScript standard, and the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation), which handles standards such as JPEG. It is important to note that standards targeting the World Wide Web should not exclude general technologies standards that affect the Internet such as the Unicode Consortium or the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).


The World Wide Web Consortium

The W3C is the largest and most influential web standards organisation. Founded in 1994 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, the W3C has gone on to standardise most of the World Wide Web that we know today. The organisation’s structure can be divided into two separate terms: administrative terms and process terms [8].

Administrative Terms

In administrative terms, the W3C is structured as follows:

Process Terms

In process terms, the W3C is structured as follows:

The main form of income to finance the W3C and its mission to standardise the web originates from donations and sponsors from individuals and organisations [11].


How Are New Web Standards Created?

A W3C standard, also known as a W3C recommendation, has to go through different maturation levels before being approved and published as an actual recommendation. There are four different levels that a standard has to go through according to the W3C Technical Reports [12], outline below.

Working Draft

This is the first public form of a future standard, which is reviewed by the community, W3C members and any other technical organisation before moving on to the next level. At this stage, the standard is not approved by the W3C, it is simply an agreement to further work on the web technology in question.

Candidate Recommendation

At this level, the standard meets the satisfaction of the group in charge it. Discussions about the actual implementation of the standard begin, and the main features are decided and unlikely to be modified.

Proposed Recommendation

The standard reaches the PR level when there is enough quality in the standard to become a W3C Recommendation and the W3C Director (currently Sir Tim Berners-Lee) accepts it. Following this step, formal reviews by Advisory Committee are triggered, which lead to the standard being approved to the next level, returned to a lower level (Working Draft) or abandoned altogether.

W3C Recommendation

The final level is reached when the W3C Members and Director endorse the standard and recommend its wide public implementation. Recommendations may still be amended in the future.

An overview of the different levels and the relations between them can be seen in Figure 3 below.

W3C Recommendation Maturity Levels
Figure 3: The transitions between the different maturity levels of a W3C Recommendation.

For example, the first CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standard was introduced in 1996 as the CSS 1 W3C Recommendation. It has since then been replaced by CSS 2, which was introduced as a Working Draft in 1997 before being approved as a W3C Recommendation in 1998. Since 2011, CSS 3 has been the recommended standard by the W3C [13].


The most popular web standards nowadays are overseen by the W3C. These include the following [7]:

Recommendations for markup languages:

Recommendations for stylesheets:

General web recommendations:

The main different between the W3C’s Recommendations and other standards organisations standards, such as the IETF Standards, is that W3C’s Recommendations are a set of guidelines to follow, which are established after agreement from the W3C Members and Director, whereas IETF Standards are more technical. It is important to note that some of these published standards are indispensable from the World Wide Web, and always work in conjunction with the W3C’s Recommendations, such as [7]:

Ecma Internation Standards:

Internet Engineering Task Force Standards:

All of these Recommendations published by various standards organisations have contributed to shaping the World Wide Web into the compatible and uniform platform that it is today, while making it more accessible to everyone.

 

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