Ciro Santilli

Standards

  1. W3C
    1. Maturity levels of standards
    2. Versions
  2. WHATWG
  3. IETF

W3C

WWW Consortium.

W3C specifies many of the key web standards including:

One important web standard that they do not specify is Javascript, which is specified by Ecma international http://www.ecma-international.org/

W3C has many important member organizations including companies, universities and others such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Adobe.

Maturity levels of standards

W3C has several levels of endorsement for standards. They are described on the “Process” document: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#maturity-levels.

Versions

Like any decent document, W3C standards are have versions, and it is possible to link either to a branch or specific version of the document.

The initial paragraph of the documents always contains links to:

Link to the one that makes most sense.

WHATWG

Specs group, split from W3C because they disagreed: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#WHATWG_and_the_W3C_HTML_WG

Started by Mozilla, Apple and Safari. http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_the_WHATWG.3F

Claim to be more practical oriented.

W3C tries to keep in touch, e.g. HTML5 has on WHATWG editor.

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force.

IETF standards are not covered here, since they are “lower level networking stuff”. See instead: https://github.com/cirosantilli/net This includes in particular HTTP.