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Due to spam attacks I had to password protect editing. The password is the web standard you use to define the presentation of a web site (in uppercase).

MACCAWS-Whitepaper-Standards

• Introduction
• Standards and the Web
• Some common myths
• The benefits of Web standards
• How to embrace Web standards
• Appendix

Standards and the Web

Standards exist to ensure quality products and safe usage for almost every kind of product and many procedures that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. For instance, in much of the world, it is standard that a red traffic light means stop, an orange light means caution, and a green light means go. These standardized rules help to ensure that all vehicles can proceed safely — regardless of what type of car, who is driving or where the vehicle is going. Without standards for traffic lights, driving would be much more chaotic than average rush-hour gridlock. In the same manner that all existing standards dictate how to build and use products and procedures, Web standards define how each of the various technologies associated with the Web should operate in order to provide a sound and stable platform.

Most commonly-used Web standards

HTML, XHTML and CSS are three of the most widely-used standards on the Web today. In this section we will discuss the origins and the nature of development of these specifications. You may wish to skip this section, but we recommend taking a little time to build an understanding of these technologies and become familiar with their history.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)

HTML is a markup language for Web documents. As it evolved, HTML became a specification for describing the structure of documents. HTML provides a way to create a document from components such as headings, paragraphs, tables, acronyms and quotations. A different technology, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is responsible for the presentation (or “look”) of documents.

New HTML specifications are no longer being written. HTML 4.01 is the final HTML standard, and is now superseded by XHTML. Authoring in XHTML is not substantially different from authoring in HTML, but it does offer enormous business benefits, especially for more complex applications. As XHTML 1.0 is a redefinition of HTML to conform to the rules of XML — it is both HTML and XML. This means that with XHTML you can take advantage of the wide adoption of HTML, and the power to manipulate information with XML.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS was developed to provide a simple and easy way to define the presentation of a Web site. While HTML defined the structure, CSS was responsible for the “look and feel” of a site. Using CSS, a Web author can define presentation elements (the layout, fonts, colours, etc.), independently from the markup of Web content. Style definitions can be defined in a completely separate document that many Web pages can refer to. A Web author can change colours and layout by changing only the style sheet(s) without the need to alter each Web document that is affected. The ability to affect many pages and even the layout of a Web site by changing only a few lines of code is what makes CSS such a valuable technology.

CSS has the advantage of allowing styles to be specified for different kinds of media including:

• browsers,
• printing,
• personal digital assistants,
• cellular phones and
• wireless media.

CSS gives you the power to make your Web pages suitable for different types of devices without having to create additional HTML pages.

Other Web standards

HTML and CSS are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the Web standards that are currently in use. Many other standards operate at different levels of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web and the Internet. For example, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is a standard that works behind the scenes, dictating how Web content is served over the Internet. While you may not need to be familiar with all these other specifications, it is a good idea to get acquainted with some other more significant Web standards so that you will have these in your tool set — and be better equipped if the need arises in future projects.

Other commonly-used Web standards include the DOM (Document Object Model) and ECMAScript (standard Javascript)

The XML Family

You might have already heard of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a standard that is the core of a large family of related technologies. These include:

• XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) — a family of recommendations that describes how XML documents should display. Also facilitates the transformation of XML documents into other formats
• RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”, “RDF Site Summary” or “Rich Site Summary”) — a popular set of formats for syndicating news and Web sites. All RSS standards currently in use are XML. RSS 1.0 is also RDF.
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) — multimedia and graphics standards. Using SVG animation in combination with the DOM can be equivalent to Flash; however it is accessible and better semantically structured. SMIL is a language that allows you to combine audio, video, images, and text to build time-based, streaming multimedia presentations.

XML is also one of the means to implement RDF (Resource Description Framework), a framework for describing relationships between resources using specific vocabularies (“ontologies”). RDF allows us to use knowledge models we have in the real world to better correlate information for re-use.

Accessibility

Apart from Web technologies, standards also exist to ensure that Web sites and the tools for creating Web sites meet other quality criteria, such as accessibility and internationalization.

Accessibility guidelines exist for Web sites, and user agents. The following table summarizes the guidelines and the kinds of systems and software they apply to:

Internationalization

While accessibility standards are in place to ensure the Web can be used by everyone, the internationalization effort aims to ensure everyone can use the Web in their native language.

Important concepts and projects in the internationalization effort include:

Character encoding

For many years different languages have had a specific encoding associated with them. This meant that multi-lingual documents were not possible and communications between systems running in different languages were not seamlessly compatible. Unicode is a standard character encoding for all languages that is now widely adopted. Organisations such as the ISO and W3C are producing frameworks for internationalization, including guidelines for implementations at an infrastructure level.

Facilitating multilingual Web pages and Web sites

This includes considerations such as:

• bi-directional text,
• ruby annotation (character annotations used to clarify the pronunciation often added to ideographic scripts such as Japanese),
• number formatting

Localization considerations

Localization considerations include such issues as:

• cultural sensitivity in graphics and text
• flexible forms that allow different address and naming conventions
• political sensitivities

Standards organizations

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets many of the Web standards that are in use today. This consortium was founded 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee with the involvement of MIT, CERN, DARPA, and the European Commission. Its members include software and hardware vendors, governments, standards bodies, content providers, and research laboratories. Technical specifications, recommendations and other missives for the Web are produced through consensus reached by its members, with input from the public through open forums and discussions. The W3C's mission and goals support a vision of the Web that is open, trusted, interoperable, decentralized, universally accessible and vendor neutral.

Other standards organisations include:

• International Organization for Standardization (http://www.iso.ch)
• The Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org)
• Ecma International (http://www.ecma-international.org/)
• The Unicode Consortium (http://www.unicode.org)
• OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org/)
• The Web3D Consortium (http://www.web3d.org)
• Open Mobile Alliance (http://www.openmobilealliance.org/) (formerly the WAP Forum)