The internet, believe it or not, is a fiendishly complicated system. With millions of different entities, all with their own agenda, it is nothing short of a small miracle that they all play nicely together. So how is it all held together and who ensures that we won't end up with a digital Tower of Babel? And can we guarantee that our digital content of today will be accessible to everyone today and in
future?What are standards? When we drive a car we are accepting and using a set of standards that have evolved since turn of century to ensure safety, convenience and fair access for all users of road system. Some of these standards are globally accepted (for instance a road is made from tarmac and wheels are made from rubber) whilst others vary from country to country (for example if we drive on left or right). The practical upshot of these standards is that a car designed and built for use in one country can be safely used in another (possibly with a little bit of inconvenience).
Technical and Social standards In general we can divide standards into two broad groupings: infrastructural and social. Infrastructural standards concern themselves with practical issues involved in building system whereas social standards relate to use of system. Sticking with road metaphor infrastructural standards concern themselves with technicalities of road building and car manufacture whilst Highway Code neatly represents social standards. As a rule infrastructural standards are easier to agree upon as their needs are more clearly defined and change more slowly but on other hand social standards are much more difficult to pin down as they cannot be deduced by clever thinking - they have to evolve over time in response to problems encountered during normal use.
What has all this got to do with web? Well internet is a transport mechanism just like road system only internet carries information from A to B rather than things. It too has underlying infrastructural standards which, like roads, are driven by technicalities of getting stuff from one place to another. These standards, maintained by a body called Internet Engineering TaskForce (IETF), are as globally accepted as manufacture of roads and cars. In fact you directly refer to this every time that you enter a web address into your browser; http:// at beginning stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol - a standard designed for sending and receiving linked textual information. It is only because every software manufacturer in world conforms to this standard and hundreds of others like it that we have a world wide web at all.
Social standards on web Founded by father of web, Tim Berners-Lee and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is body responsible for maintaining social standards on web.
Social standards for road system are relatively simple compared to nightmare that unfolds when you try and devise procedures to represent and display visual information. All of social standards for road system including speed limits, parking restrictions, lane discipline etc can be contained within a 100 page booklet that is easily readable by most people. Since it was founded in October 1994 W3C has produced over fifty deeply technical specifications and it still isn't even close to finishing its job.
