World Wide Web strives and has been since inception to be well organized, standardized and be available to everybody no matter where a person is from.Sometimes that can be really difficult if not impossible (at least initially) to achieve. For instance, since the Web explosion in the middle 90’s, browsers  have been competing for the market share by introducing new and proprietary tools or applications that behaved differently on different browsers. That in turn was quite nightmarish for the web developers having a need of making multiple code versions for multiple browsers, or, as they say, making it quirky.That “Browser Wars”, so called, was a big challenge for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international body for web standards, as it’s been taking long time for most of the browsers to accept new proposals, with Internet Explorer being historically the slowest in dropping their proprietary tools and replacing it with the proposed version of same.

Tools

The W3C has been trying to develop a standard tool or markup language for all of the aspects of a web design needed. Here we are referring to a variety of fields, such as web page structure and layout, graphical applications and animation, working with media, applications for mobile users, etc... The lists of major W3C proposed design standards and suggested practices for developers and belonging descriptions are presented below.

Web Design Standards

Structure and layout

Scripting

  • DOM and DOM events -> Document Object Model is a scripting interface that allows scripts to dynamically access and update content, structure, style or events on documents.
  • JavaScript (ECMAscript) API’s -> Client based scripting language that is often used to approach a current page and modify it directly from the client’s browser or upon re-load. Many API’s are defined by W3C, such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
  • WAI ARIA -> Accessible Rich Internet Applications defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.
  • XForms -> XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML, ODF or SVG.
  • XBL -> The XML Binding Language (XBL) is used to re-order simple HTML or XHTML markup and enables them to have complex CSS styles applied without polluting the markup with multiple semantically neutral div elements.

Graphics

  • SVG -> Scalable Vector Graphics is a markup language for describing all aspects of an image, including shapes, geometry, animation (via SMIL), and can effectively change many of its characteristics such as opacity, shade etc...
  • PNG -> Portable Network Graphics is a compressed image file format that features rich color control, with index-color, grayscale and truecolor support as well as alpha-transparency.
  • WebCGM -> Computer Graphics Metafile is a web derivation of an ISO standard, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster graphics.

Audio & Video

  • SMIL -> Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language is an XML based language for describing interactive multimedia presentations. It allows visual transitions between hypertext, audio / video, images and other type elements.
  • Timed Text -> Timed Text is an XML-based language to timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. It is used for captioning or video description.

Mobile Web

  • CSS mobile -> a profile of the cascading style sheet language that matches the need of mobile Web authors.
  • SVG Tiny -> a profile of the Web’s scalable vector graphics format well-suited to the capabilities of mobile devices.
  • XHTML For Mobile -> defines a subset of XHTML for mobile.

Math on Web

  • MathML -> Mathematics Markup Language is the Web's technology for storing and transporting mathematical formulas. It can be used both for including formulas in documents and for exchange of data between mathematical software. 

Web Development Practices

Accessibility

Internationalization

  • i18N - > The Internationalization Activity works with W3C Working Groups, related standards bodies, and with designers, developers and content authors generally, to raise awareness of and thereby avoid issues related to the international use of the Web. It also promotes solutions for the needs of specific cultures, languages and writing systems.

Privacy

Semantic Web     

  • SW -> Semantic Web refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data. Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. Linked data are empowered by technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and SKOS.