Check Out This List of Influential Technology Standard Groups!
The only way users can view content on the Internet is by using a web browser on a PC, tablet, smartphone, or some other device. The challenge for web developers is to make the content available on as many devices as possible.
Every web browser (the industry calls them “user agents”) we use is created by a browser vender, such as Microsoft and Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari. The browser venders must follow ever-changing web specifications for the greatest success of rendering content for the best user experience.
Web developers must stay abreast of these ever-transforming standards in order to take advantage of them. There are many places to learn how to program against the cutting-edge standards. However, some of the best places to learn about them are on the web sites from the very same web standards groups that control them.
It can be challenging for a developer to know all the web standard groups and the standards they uphold. Here are the most popular web standards groups and the technologies they represent.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Headquartered at MIT, the W3C is the primary web standards organization sharing the rendering rules for many different web technologies including all versions of HTML, CSS, DOM, XML, XSL, SOAP, SVG, WAI-ARIA, and much more. Here is a list of all their standards and drafts: http://www.w3.org/TR/
The non-profit ISOC is a large international organization made up of 55,000+ members. Its primary purpose is to provide leadership and financial support to the internet standards used in a corporate environment. It also provides structure and funding for its powerful child organization, the IETF.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
ISOC and the IETF are the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the internet. They publish Request For Comments (RFC) documents that list technology theories and programming APIs. Many times, these documents are requests for peer review in the early stages of defining internet standards that end up being engineering references. You can see a list of all their RFC documents dating back to 1969 here: http://ietf.org/rfc.html
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
The IANA works closely with the IETF maintaining the standards for the Domain Name System (DNS), IP addressing, and the codes/numbers used with networking protocol. These standards are published with RFC documents. These three types of documents are easily accessed from their home page.
This group is a standards organization for information and communication systems. Originally called the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), it changed its name to reflect the global membership of the group, making the acronym defunct. They are in charge with many famous technologies including C++, C#, Office Open XML, JSON, CD-ROM, and the popular ECMAScript language. Many people mistakenly believe that the JavaScript standards are controlled by the W3C since they also uphold the HTML and CSS standards.
International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
Founded in 1947, ISO promotes worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial standards. Besides setting the standards for CD images (ISOs!), they also control the standards for technology security management and popular programming languages such as COBOL, C, ForTran, and SQL. In 2012, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 were approved as an ISO/IEC International standard.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
This is technically a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. They help maintain quality standards for technical weight and measurements for industries such as the latest encryption algorithms. There has been much controversy whether NIST has been trying to insert backdoors into newly accepted encryption algorithms by those creating and submitting new algorithms.
American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
The ANSI group does not create standards but rather focuses on helping others create standards. Many languages such as Fortran and COBOL were also published as ANSI standard versions. They also control the ASCII and EBCDIC.
The Unicode Consortium (Unicode)
The Unicode Consortium oversees the development of the Unicode standard. Its goal is to enforce Unicode, claiming that many of the existing schemes are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode’s success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread use in the internationalization of software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, modern database servers, Microsoft .NET, Java, web browsers, and operating systems such as Windows.
Technically not a standards committee, they closely worked with the browser vendors by encouraging them to develop web browsers that adhered to the latest web standards. Perhaps their angry bee logo reflected the frustration felt by many developers having to create duplicate content to work correctly across multiple web browsers not adhering to the latest published standards. The group published three famous ACID tests (ACID1, ACID 2, ACID 3) that highlighted (exposed) the lack of support for HTML, CSS, and ECMAScript standards of the web browsers at the time of their releases. Since this group broke up, an ACID 4 test for CSS3 compliancy will likely not be developed.
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG)
Also not technically a standards group, the WHATWG group formed from a selection of dismayed developers from Mozilla, Apple and Opera who were not happy with the W3C’s pace or direction of creating a new XML-based language that broke previous HTML web standards. They decided to create their own standards that would be compatible with previous versions and roll them into their web browsers. Acknowledging the popularity of the WHATWG’s work, much of their work has been accepted by the W3C while the W3C stopped development on XHTML2. The WHATWG is still working on standards such as web workers, microdata, and Web Forms 2.0.
