Web Standards Group

About Web Standards

What are web standards?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call “web standards,” are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Please see the sidebar for details.

Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

The Web Standards Project

The web standards

Structural and Semantic Languages
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 4.01
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) 1.0
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0
Presentation Languages
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) level 1
CSS level 2 revision 1
CSS level 3 (CRs or better)
Object Models
Document Object Model (DOM) level 1
DOM Level 2 (HTML, Core, Events, Traversal)
DOM Level 3 (Core)
Scripting Languages
ECMAScript 262 (the standard version of JavaScript)
Extensions and updates to HTML4 and XHTML 1.0
microformats
Web Applications 1.0 (AKA "HTML5")
XHTML 1.1
Additional Markup Languages
Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1.01
MathML 2.0

What are the benefits of using web standards

A site that has been built to web standards generally will be:

What is the Web Standards Group about?

The Web Standards Group is for web designers & developers who are interested in web standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT etc.) and best practices (accessible sites using valid and semantically correct code). We aim to: