Web standards are an important piece of building the future of the internet,
creating a framework for web developers to work with and guidelines to ensure
that web pages will display the same regardless of the browser that they are
viewed in. Standardization has come a long way since the early days of web
development, and as languages such as HTML and XML continue to evolve the need
for additional standardization is obvious. Without fixed web standards, a number
of compatibility problems could begin to arise because different web developers
will be trying to do the same things in drastically different ways.
The necessity of some form of standard for web development has been apparent
ever since developers began trying to create self-contained web pages. Originally
the internet consisted largely of static documents with minimal coding or interactivity,
and the most advanced code available was basic JavaScript. The most commonly
used pieces of HTML were links, background colors, and text colors. At this
point fledgling web developers had given no thought to standardization, because
there honestly wasn’t very much to standardize. Unfortunately, this would
lead to trouble in the near future.
The World Wide Web Consortium
The beginnings of web standardization came from the World Wide Web Consortium,
better known today as the W3C. The Consortium was created as a means of recommending
web standards for future generations of internet browsers, and featured a board
of directors who were leaders of industry in regards to internet and World
Wide Web technologies. The W3C saw the need for early standardization in order
to prevent confusion later on, and from the very beginning was trying to recommend
useful standards which would enable cross-browser compatibility of code.
Unfortunately, the W3C had no direct control over the companies who were making
the internet browsers themselves. Even though the creator of the World Wide
Web himself was the chairman of the W3C’s board of directors, in the
early days of the Web the organization trying to standardize it held very little
power to see its recommendations carried out.
The Browser Wars
As generally happens in the field of new technologies with little standardization,
problems were on the horizon. Two leaders emerged with commonly-used web browsers:
Microsoft with their Internet Explorer, and Netscape with Netscape Communicator.
Each wanted to be more popular than the other, and in order to do so sought
to create new functionalities for their web browsers that the competition would
be unable to use. This led to what was known as the “Browser Wars”,
in which each successive version of the Netscape and Microsoft browsers would
feature new features and markups that would only display correctly (or in some
cases, would only display period) in that particular browser.
Web developers were faced with a dilemma... with each browser having its own
coding required to access the latest features, those who were trying to create
websites would either have to add detection code to see which browser was being
used and then select the appropriate code to display (meaning that each page
had twice as much code as it would actually use), or they would have to simply
place a note on their page saying “This page is optimized for Internet
Explorer” or “This page is optimized for Netscape.” This
incompatibility continued for several years, with each company occasionally
adopting some of the W3C recommendations but still featuring enough proprietary
markup code to make cross-browser web design a hassle.
The Coming of Modern Standards
In order to stabilize the World Wide Web and stop the needless double-coding,
the first web standards were introduced by the W3C. While the standards weren’t
able to make use of the browser-specific markups that both Microsoft and Netscape
had introduced, they were able to create effective work-arounds so that the
proprietary code was no longer necessary to create desired effects. The first
true web standards were the now-common HTML and CSS, which stand for HyperText
Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets respectively. HTML standardized
the way in which websites were displayed, while CSS allowed for HTML information
to be displayed in new and creative layouts.
Because of the ease of use of HTML and the customization that could be added
to websites using CSS, these initial standards were quickly embraced by web
developers who were tired of having to jump through hoops to ensure that their
pages displayed correctly in all browsers. In order to maintain interest in
their products, both Microsoft and Netscape began adapting their products to
use the popular web standards instead of their in-house markups. As Netscape
converted its browsers to the Mozilla project (the open-source origin of the
popular FireFox browser), its open-source stance fully embraced standardization
in order to allow contributors from all over the world to have the same goal
in browser development.
Additional standards followed, and as of the beginning of 2008 there were a total of 7 standards which were in use in various web applications. In addition to HTML and CSS (the combination of which is often known as Dynamic HTML, or DHTML), there is XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) which is similar to HTML but allows the user to have much more control over their pages by giving them the ability to define their own tags and document types. DOM (the Document Object Model) is another standard which is designed to allow scripting languages to work in a browser-and-platform-independent environment to make the implementing of scripts easier. ECMAScript (created by a separate standardization group, the ECMA) is essentially a standardized version of JavaScript. XHTML (the eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a modified version of HTML, designed to be run as an XML application instead of a separate language. XSL (the eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is similar to CSS for XML; it is a language that is designed to manipulate the way that XML documents are displayed in a similar means to how CSS alters the display of HTML documents.