WebReference Articles

A Little More than Standard

Ryan Hancock offers both a proposal and an invitation to the Web development community - that collectively created standards for Web design would be as useful as standards for the markup and programming languages that developers use. What do you think? More explicit Web design standards - help or hindrance?

Organizations

IAHC

A coalition of participants from the broad Internet community, working to satisfy the requirement for enhancements to the Internet's global Domain Name System (DNS).

ISO

The International Organization for Standardization. ISO is a "worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country." ISO sets the Net-related standards of technology and OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) that fosters full connectivity for worldwide communications systems.

The International Telecommunications Union

"The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within which governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services. ITU activities include the coordination, development, regulation and standardization of telecommunications and organization of regional and world TELECOM events."

IETF

The Internet Engineering Task Force is the protocol engineering and development arm of the Internet. The work is done in various working groups, which include HTML, http, MIME, etc. Out of the drafts and RFC standards come the new Web and Internet protocols.

The Internet Society

"A non-governmental International organization for global cooperation and coordination for the Internet and its internetworking technologies and applications." The ISOC considers the RFC's from the IETF and if approved, they become Internet standards.

NCITS

The National Committee for Information Technology Standards' (formerly X3) mission is to produce market-driven, voluntary consensus standards for multimedia, databases, storage media, and programming languages.

The World Wide Web Consortium

The W3C "promotes the Web by producing specifications and reference software. W3C is funded by industrial members but its products are freely available to all. The Consortium has representation from the U.S. (MIT/LCS), Europe (INRIA & CERN), and Japan (Keio University).

Collections

Computer and Communications Standards Documentation

"This set of Computer and Communications pages is intended to provide "one stop" shopping for information about the developing global information infrastructure." Large collection of standards, references, news and links.

Computers and Internet: Standards

From Yahoo.

The Standards Page

A meta-list of all kinds of standards. Looks like it may have stopped being updated, but still very comprehensive.

Web Naming and Addressing

"Addressing is one of the fundamental technologies in the web. URLs, or Uniform Resouce Locators, are the technology for addressing documents on the web. It is an extensible technology: there are a number of existing addressing schemes, and more may be incorporated over time." Has definitions, specifications, and more. From the W3C.

World Standards Services Network

WSSN is a network of publicly accessible World Wide Web servers of standards organizations around the world. Through the Web sites of its members, WSSN provides information on international, regional and national standardization and related activities and services.

WWW Virtual Library: Standards and Standardization Bodies

A collection of home pages of various standard setting organizations, including the IETF, ISO, and the W3C.

Comments are welcome