• nearly everything is standardized to some degree
• weights and measures in late 18th C
• rifle parts became interchangeable in early 19th C
• railway gauges in mid-19th C
• telecommunications in mid-19th C
• electric wire in 20th C
• paper yet to be internationally standardized
• radio, television, pencil lead, plumbing fixtures, batteries, shoes, tires and more - all standardized
• enable interoperability, efficiency, competition and mass production

• large organizations: governments, armies, and the like solve problems and document their solutions
• inventors come up with standards for their own inventions
• proximity or necessity forces others to adopt the same or similar standards in order to communicate, share data, materiel, etc.
• those with foresight adopt mechanisms for collaborating on, documenting, and distributing standards
• standards themselves evolve once documented, to meet new and unforeseen challenges

• what everyone uses due to massive user base
• no/few feasible alternatives exist

• may have some public documentation
• not officially known as standards
• issued by informal standards organizations (W3C, IETF)

• go through strict processes of documentation and review
• issued by formal standards organizations (ISO, ANSI, ECMA)

• standards take lots of time and money to develop
• owners of de facto standards often jealously guard competitive advantages
• even the best documentation has ambiguities
• competing standards are often developed in tandem and no clear winner emerges
• landscape can change before standardization is complete
• widespread adoption of standard may well hinder development/adoption of better solutions
• cultural factors can also hinder adoption

• the Internet is powered by open standards
• standard algorithms make online security possible
• search engines rely on standard forms of metadata
• government sites must be accessible under law
• browsers and servers speak the same protocols
• media formats are mostly standardized
• character sets are standardized
• the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from...

• published as RFC 791, 793 (now BCP 5, 7)

• published as RFC 959 (BCP 9)

• published as RFC 1870, 821 (BCP 10-11)

• published as RFC 1034-5 (now BCP 13)

• published as RFC 2045-9 (draft standards)

• published as RFC 1939 (now BCP 53)

• protects private data transfer on the Web
• supported by most modern browsers
• being standardized by IETF as TLS

• protects exchange of credit card information
• still in the process of being adopted
• more popular in Europe and rest of the world

• encrypts messages (email, others)

• popular public key encryption method

• META tag keywords, descriptions
• various other methods

• specifies labels for common metadata
• widely adopted by large search vendors
• needs large user base on Web to succeed

• specifies what a spider may index on a site
• widely adopted by almost all indexers

• US government sites must comply with Section 508 guidelines for accessibility
• not just about the blind or hearing impaired, but also colorblind, those with learning disabilities, others.

• promotes education and cooperation among accessibility initiatives
• reviews all W3C standards for accessibility

• supported by all Web servers and browsers
• allows browsers to request any Web resource

• allows any resource to be uniquely named
• specify protocol, host, port, and resource

• allow the major type and subtype of any resource to be specified

• provides generic markup facility for hypertext documents

• originally intended to specify font information for typesetters ("18 point/24 point Helvetica")
• as documents became more standardized, markup became more abstract ("title", "byline")
• as documents became electronically stored, more powerful solutions developed
• SGML (ISO 8879:1986) is a "metalanguage"
• allows for the specification of entire markup languages (not a markup language itself)
• SGML influenced HTML, but was too complex for the Web as far as most were concerned
• XML simplifies SGML, considered a "proper subset of SGML" (though only possible by way of an addendum to SGML standard)

• original HTML was influenced by SGML syntax (bracket-delimited tags, attributes, comments)
• Dave Raggett of HP codified HTML as SGML document type (DTD)
• various vendors added new elements and attributes, along with new functionality
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded to guide and arbitrate evolution of HTML and other Web standards
• HTML4 released as final version of HTML
• subsequent development focuses on XML
• XHTML 1.0 is HTML recast as XML
• XHTML 1.1 is modular, allows for extensibility

• allow for separation of presentation logic from document structure and semantics
• makes reuse of style information possible

• allows any element or attribute to be accessed from within scripting languages

• de facto standard cross-browser scripting language, standardized by ECMA
• can use DOM to manipulate document contents

• subset of SGML for Web documents

• many style languages for SGML, notably DSSSL
• early Web assumed basic presentation rules that the user could modify
• authors and designers demanded more control
• Netscape introduced font, tables for layout
• CSS introduced to provide separation of presentation from document structure, on client
• CSS also designed not to be specific to HTML, may also be used with XML
• eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XSL Transformations (XSLT) more commonly used on server or as part of some other translation process

• combination of HTML/XHTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript
• Netscape and Explorer introduced competing DOMs in the 4.* browser generation
• Netscape "document.layers" object model
• Explorer "document.all" object model
• W3C adopted most of Explorer DOM, Netscape event model, and more as standard DOM
• still being developed, implemented
• enables truly dynamic documents, client-side Web applications

• custom XML tagsets (possibly integrated with XHTML) with separate presentation logic (CSS)

• XML-encoded transactions driving powerful distributed applications
• remote procedure calls (XML-RPC, SOAP)

• documents designed to enable quasi-intelligent agents and even hardware
• self-negotiating protocols of meaning and interpretation

• massive install base of existing, non-compliant browsers
• incomplete specifications, patent issues
• Web standards often lack reference implementations which uncover bugs and/or weaknesses in specifications
• may well be more valuable to vendors not to follow specifications
• alternately, little or no impetus for vendors to abandon proprietary implementations
• non-integrated implementations of individual specifications are useless
• developer education absolutely vital
• support from vendors essential (browsers, authoring tools, content management)

• massive install base will upgrade eventually
• bitter rivals are cooperating
• reference implementations often span languages and environments
• excellent standards compliant implementations do exist (IE5/Mac, Mozilla, Opera)
• many vendors have abandoned proprietary implementations (notably Netscape)
• integrated implementations are improving
• grassroots and professional organizations are making education a priority
• companies and developers well aware of costs of building non-standard sites and knowledge bases

We are at an important time in the development of the Web, with one browser (MSIE) dominating market share, but demonstrating commitment to standards

Mozilla/Netscape and other browsers in a position to compete, and are also committed to standards (some would say more so than MS)

Due to current economic downturn, companies and organizations focus on return on investment, customer retention, intelligent knowledge management, usability, accessibility

A Web built on standard technologies holds more promise than a fractured, proprietary one