Web Standards

In 1998, the browser market was dominated by Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.

A beta version of Internet Explorer 5 was then released, and it implemented a new and proprietary dynamic HTML, which meant that professional web developers needed to know five different ways of writing JavaScript.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) group formed to help standardize web development principles and W3C documents
In 2000, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition. This was a very important milestone, it being the default browser installed with the Mac OS at the time, and having a reasonable level of support for the W3C recommendations too. Along with Opera's decent level of support for CSS and HTML, it contributed to a general positive movement, where web developers and designers finally felt comfortable designing sites using web standards, as they knew they would work to a reasonable level across multiple browsers.
When HTML 4 was nearing completion, the W3C decided (in a workshop run in 1998) that in terms of markup languages, the future of the Web was XML and XHTML, not HTML (comparison of XHTML and HTML).
So the W3C drew a line under HTML 4.01 and instead concentrated on the XHTML 1.0 spec, finished in early 2000. XHTML 1.0 is just the same as HTML 4.01, except that it uses the stricter markup syntax rules of XML.
XHTML 2.0 soon followed, which added a whole bunch of new powerful features, and aimed to be the next big thing on the Web.

HTML5

In 2004, a group of like minded developers and implementers (including representatives from Opera, Mozilla and slightly later, Apple) got together and formed a breakaway spec group called the WHATWG, with the aim of writing a better HTML markup spec that could handle authoring the new breed of web applications, without — crucially — breaking backwards compatibility.

The result was the Web Applications 1.0 specification, which documented existing inter-operable browser behaviors and features, as well as new features for the Web stack such as APIs and new DOM parsing rules.

March 7 2007 the work on HTML was restarted with a new HTML Working Group in an open participation process. In the first few days, hundreds of participants joined to continue to work on the next version of HTML. One of the first decisions of the HTML WG was to adopt the Web Applications 1.0 spec and call it HTML5.

HTML5 is a really good thing for web developers and designers, because it:

Adds powerful new features to HTML that were previously only available on the Web using plugin technologies like Flash, or with complex JavaScript and hacks.

You don't need to learn completely new languages to use HTML5.

CSS 3

CSS2 specification was nearing completion is around 1999/2000, and although it was a powerful language with many great features, its creators knew that it had limitations. There were a number of visual/stylistic things that CSS couldn't do, and that developers had to turn to hacks, JavaScript or plugins to achieve. This includes things such as animation, dynamic layouts, and using custom fonts on pages.

Work on CSS3 started as early as 2000. The spec writers decided on a modular structure, with different pieces of distinct functionality being broken down into manageable chunks.

This made it easier not only for the writers to write, but also for the browsers to implement, and the web designers/developers to learn.

A lot more features have been added since the first spec version in 2000, and we didn't start to see browser support for many of the features until about 2006.

At the time of writing, CSS3 has over 40 modules in various stages of completion. You can track their progress and find out more at the W3C CSS current work & how to participate page.

1.2.1 Web Standards

posted July 19, 2015

During the browser wars, Microsoft and Netscape implemented new features rather than fixing existing problems.

Each company added proprietary features and created features that were in direct competition with existing features in the other browser, but implemented in an incompatible way.

Developers at the time sometimes had to build two different but effectively duplicate sites for the two main browsers, and other times just choosing to support only one browser and block others from using their sites.

It was a perfect time to develop Web Standards to help make the programming languages and technologies of web design and development more efficient, consistent and equitable.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The W3C’s vision was to standardize the protocols and technologies used to build the web for the world.

During the next few years, the W3C published several recommendations including:

However, the W3C did not (and still do not) enforce their recommendations. Manufacturers only had to conform to the W3C documents if they wished to label their products as W3C-compliant.

The Web Standards Project

In 1998, the browser market was dominated by Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.

A beta version of Internet Explorer 5 was then released, and it implemented a new and proprietary dynamic HTML, which meant that professional web developers needed to know five different ways of writing JavaScript.

HTML5

CSS 3