Web standards

Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specification that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web (W3C). 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.

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.

A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director.

An IETF Internet Standard is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a number in the IETF STD series while retaining its original IETF RFC number.

The only way to fight is to provide it – and this is what nowadays HTML, CSS and JavaScript do as the Flash competitors, based on Web standards. The so-obvious- in -the -past boundary between Flash websites and Web standards gradually disappeared to an extent – you can never be sure at first glance which technology has been used to build a particular Web site.

The list of websites favoring Web standards is constantly growing nowadays. Well there is a good apart reason for that - the iPad and iPhone’s lack of Flash - someone will say! That is correct but it is not the only reason - there are other certain benefits that Web standards bring.