The web standards project is an important non-profit organisation of programmers and web users. It’s volunteer-based and deliberately pressures browser publishers to stick to the standards that are published and maintained by the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium. Quite some time ago, browser publishers started adding proprietary code to what should be open standards. This has made it significantly more difficult for developers to do their job.
Technipages Explains Web Standards Project
They now need to add lengthy blocks of code that is capable of detecting which type of browser a user is using, and then bind instructions for that specific browser to make sure that a website displays as it should. Without this, instructions that don’t suit the proprietary version of HTML used by a browser, will either be ignored entirely or simply misinterpreted – in either case, the website does not display correctly.
This means that a website has ‘hidden’ instructions that only come to play when a specific browser is used – this can be as specific as which version. For example, a developer may specify that any version of Chrome before 54.3.2 is to follow rule X while newer versions of Chrome are to follow rule Y instead. This is difficult and makes simple creations more complicated. Despite this, and despite the efforts from the web standards project, efforts to remedy this have seen only extremely limited success – for the most part, things remain proprietary.
Browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorere, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Google Chrome and so on each have these differences and thus require special coding instructions in some, but not all cases. Often, animations are affected, while ‘plain’ text will display correctly either way.
Common Uses of Web Standards Project
- The Web Standards Project aims to get browser publishers to use the exact open standards that the W3C publishes and maintains.
- Due to most publishers being unwilling to change their working setups, the Web Standards Project has met a lot of resistance, and little success.
- Although the Web Standards Project is made up of experts and developers, their advice has largely gone ignored.
Common Misuses of Web Standards Project
- The Web Standards Project is the group that publishes and maintains HTML and web coding standards.
