Open Standards for Web, Internet and System Interoperability

Key open standards and the organisations that make them:

• Web standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, XLST, etc). — the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
• Core Internet standards (TCP/IP, (E)SMTP, DNS, etc.) — the Internet Society’s Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Requests for Comments (RFC).
• Underlying electronic communications standards (Ethernet, Firewire, WiFi, etc.) — the US-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the UK-based Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE).
• General international standards (programming languages, mark-up, Unicode, natural language character sets, etc) — the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the 148 national standards bodies affiliated to it.
• Fast tracked specifications drafted in international standards format (JavaScript/ECMAScript, C#, CLI, etc.) — the European association for standardising information and communication systems (ECMA International).

Open standards are not the solution to every problem of computer interoperability, but they do play a part in most sensible solutions. This section of our site will provide background, summary and interpretive information about some of the key standards which govern modern electronic business.

Within that discussion we will try to answer questions like: what constitutes a standard (rather than mere popular practice)? What makes a standard ‘open’? What is the role of reference implementations in open standards? And, what is the relationship between open standards and open source software?