Standards

4.1. Standards#

4.1.1. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)#

The W3C, founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, is an international community that develops and maintains web standards. The organisation aims to lead the web to its full potential by creating guidelines that ensure a free, open, and accessible internet for everyone.

The W3C has three core design principles as part of its mission:

  1. Web for all

    The social value of the web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, strive for diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, disabilities, gender identities, and more.

  2. Web of trust

    The web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now meet on the web and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognises that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence. As more activity moves online, it will become even more important to support complex interactions among parties around the globe.

  3. Web on everything

    The number of different kinds of devices that can access the web has grown immensely. Mobile phones, smart phones, interactive television systems, voice response systems, kiosks and even certain domestic appliances can all access the web.

4.1.2. Web Standards#

Web standards are a set of guidelines and specifications designed to ensure that websites and web applications work consistently across different devices, browsers, and operating systems. These standards promote interoperability, accessibility, and a reliable user experience for everyone on the web.

Web standards are developed by various organisations, with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) being the most prominent. By adhering to these standards, developers can create web applications that are future-proof, maintainable, and inclusive.

Standardisation brings benefits such as:

  • Interoperability: Ensures web content works consistently across different platforms and devices.

  • Accessibility: Makes the web usable for people with disabilities.

  • Consistency: Maintains uniform behavior and appearance across browsers.

  • Ease of Maintenance: Simplifies updates and fixes by adhering to common practices.

Examples#

There are numerous web standards defined by the W3C, some of which you may already be familiar with or use:

  • HTML5: Defines the structure and content of web pages.

  • CSS3: Controls the style and layout of web pages.

  • HTTP/HTTPS: Protocols for secure communication over the web.

4.1.3. W3C’s Influence and Impact#

The W3C not only serves to define the technical requirements of web technologies but to improve the experience of the web for all users. The W3C furthers this experience through:

  • Establishing initiatives and working groups

  • Developing new standards e.g. WCAG and WAI-ARIA

Typically working groups will be formed from a group of volunteer representatives from industry, government and the open source community. The working groups will develop recommendations and draft standards which are openly reviewed and then finalised.

We will focus on the following areas, where the W3C has exerted considerable influence and impact:

  • Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

  • Internationalisation (I18n)

  • Web Security and Privacy

  • Machine-readable Data

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)#

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) ensures that the web is accessible to people with disabilities.

This initiative is one of the largest initiatives by the W3C and encompasses standards such as:

  • WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications): Enhances accessibility for dynamic content and advanced user interface controls.

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Standards for making web content accessible.

Aside from the standards, the W3C provides detailed practical guidance on how to design, develop and test accessible web sites.

Hint

We recommend reading the following pages from the WAI website:

Internationalisation (I18n)#

Internationalisation refers to designing and developing software in a way that it will work well for users of different cultures and languages. Internationalisation includes but is not limited to translation and localisation. For example, consider that simply providing translated versions of your software is unlikely to work properly if you want to support languages that are written in right-to-left order instead of English’s left-to-right.

This is a major problem to solve. The W3C has created multiple working groups and a larger “Activity” which coordinates between different working groups:

The W3C Internationalisation (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organisations to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures

Hint

We recommend reading the following pages from the I18n Activity website:

Web Security and Privacy#

The W3C provides standards and guidelines to ensure secure and privacy-compliant web applications, which is critical when handling sensitive user data.

One of the most impactful standards for web security is HTTPS, which enables secure communication of HTTP traffic. However this standard was developed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Despite this, the W3C promotes the use of HTTPS as the default protocol for web traffic through its developer documentation such as best practices, guidelines, and technical notes.

On top of HTTPS, the W3C has developed standards that enhance the security and privacy of using web technology such as

  • Content Security Policy (CSP)

  • Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

Hint

We recommend reading the following pages from Mozilla:

Machine-readable Data#

The growing need for machine-readable data, driven by search engines and the recent explosion of machine learning, has led to the development of guidelines from the W3C.

Building websites that are machine readable makes the content easier to discover and access.

Hint

We recommend browsing the following page from W3C

You can informally test a page’s compatibility with machine reading with Google’s Rich Results Test.