Standard Bearers: How the W3C Sets Benchmarks for the Web

Nancy Winnick Cluts
Developer Technology Engineer
Microsoft Corporation

July 18, 1997
Updated: July 29, 1997

The following article was originally published in the Site Builder Network Magazine.

It seems like once a week that I see another new standard being proposed. I read the press release, search the Web for more information, and stow each nugget away in a virtual folder on my hard disk. But with so many acronyms around, it can get really confusing trying to sort out which of the different HTML extensions you should or should not use.

And just who decides on these standards, anyway? Wouldn't you like to know? This article explains who sets standards for the World Wide Web, what the best known of those standards are, and where to find more detailed information about them.

Doesn't James Bond Drive A W3C?

No, that would be the Z3, otherwise known as the item I'd most like to see under the Christmas tree this year. The World Wide Web Consortium

(W3C) is an international industry association created collaboratively with the CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics

(where the World Wide Web originated) to develop common standards and protocols for the burgeoning Web. Membership in the consortium is open only to organizations, not individuals. The W3C is vendor neutral, and produces specifications and free reference software. On the W3C Web site, you can see lots of Web specifications and reference material. There are also prototypes and sample applications demonstrating the use of the new technologies specified there. Each W3C technology recommendation goes through a review. The stages of review are Working Draft, Proposed Recommendation, and finally Recommendation. The membership of the W3C must come to a consensus for a proposal to become a recommendation.

Two other organizations deal with Internet standards and specificiations. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) publishes specifications on Internet protocols (such as TCP/IP). Its many specifications and RFC (Request for Comments) documents are available at http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/ID.html and http://www.rfc-editor.org/ . The Internet Society is a non-governmental, international organization for Internet technologies and applications. It provides Internet statistics, market research, public information, and historical materials.

Standards Support

Recently, Microsoft and Netscape pledged to support all W3C recommendations and submit all new tags to the W3C before shipping them. What does this mean to you? It improves the chance that your Web site, if it uses recommended W3C tags, will run on both browsers. That means less work for you and greater availability to visitors to your site.

In this section, we'll discuss some of the more visible proposals, including DHTML, CDF, and CSS. Specifications for these standards can be found on Microsoft's Standards site. Let's start with a description of Dynamic HTML, otherwise known as DHTML.

Dynamic HTML

The umbrella term "Dynamic HTML" includes several different categories: HTML 4.0 (the next version of HTML), 2-D positioning, dynamic content (including dynamic styles), data binding, and multimedia filters. HTML 4.0 extends HTML 3.2 . Netscape has already commited to supporting the Document Object Model standard, as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and CSS-Positioning (the latest release of Netscape's browser includes partial support for CSS-Positioning).

The Document Object Model is the core of Dynamic HTML, and Microsoft's implementation of the Document Object Model provides almost all of the features listed in the requirements document. For now, here's the skinny on DHTMLOM (welcome to acronym hell, folks). Dynamic HTML is a set of technologies you can use to activate your Web content. The object model is what makes these technologies programmable. In other words, the object model allows you, the content developer, the ability to control the tags provided by HTML. And you can control the tags in response to user action (such as a mouse click). That's what makes it dynamic. In addition to the ability to change the styles of a tag on the fly, you can also dynamically change the layout of the page.

Dynamic HTML supports data binding, so data elements can be bound to HTML pages. A proposal now before the W3C outlines a standard way to bind data to HTML. Okay, so what are data elements, you might ask -- and why is this a good thing? Let's say you have a Web page with elements that correspond to items in a database hosted on your server. Using data binding, you can directly connect the items on the Web page to their corresponding items in the database. This feature is especially useful in the intranet setting.

You might wonder why I haven't mentioned the multimedia extensions for DHTML. Dynamic HTML's Multimedia Extensions don't use new, unsupported tags. The effects use the existing CSS and <OBJECT> constructs in HTML.

Channel Definition Format

The Channel Definition Format (CDF) is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). Microsoft submitted its CDF Proposal to the W3C in March. The CDF specification permits a Web publisher to offer automatic delivery of information (called channels) from any Web server to Web users. The CDF standard submission is an application of XML work that the W3C has in progress. The XML-Data specification is the initial proposed specification for exchanging structured, networked data on the Web.

XML is a simplified subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879), specifically designed for Web applications. It provides a standard format to describe different types of data -- such as an appointment record, a purchase order, or a database record -- so that the information can be decoded, manipulated, and displayed consistently and correctly. XML provides a file format for representing data, a method for describing data structure, and a mechanism for extending and annotating HTML with semantic information. XML allows an unlimited set of tags, and each indicates not how something should look, but what kind of data it contains. For example, a tag might hold a price, an order number, or a name. Each document's author can determine what kind of data to use and choose tag types, either public or devised by the author, that fit the Web site's needs.

CDF allows you to cram information down your customer's throat. (Only kidding. Push technology is actually a very cool thing.) Channels are supported in Internet Explorer 4.0, and allow the user to subscribe to Web sites for automatic delivery of information. The user can choose which channels she wants to subscribe to and how often that information is delivered to her desktop. Even we Site Builder Networkers have a channel!

Cascading Style Sheets

For two-dimensional positioning, the W3C has recommended the CSS Positioning standard. The working draft, Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets , proposes to extend CSS to support the positioning (both relative and absolute) and visibility of HTML elements in 3-D space.

CSS also allows authors to attach style sheets that control fonts, colors, and spacing to HTML documents. You can set the style for a specific HTML item (i.e., you can set the color of a heading to blue), and you can designate a style sheet as preferred. For example, you might want to specify a style sheet that makes the overall fonts larger on a site to make the site more readable to a person with sight impairment. CSS separates the presentation from the content, giving you a greater ability to reuse presentation information across your Web site. You can specify the appearance of all your Web-pages in a single style sheet. Changing this one file can change the appearance of all your documents, without modifying any of the content HTML. Detailed information on CSS can be found in its specification .

Nancy Winnick Cluts, developer-technology writer extraordinaire, thinks we don't know about those offers she has been fielding to become a nationally syndicated talk-radio star. But we're not giving her up without a fight.

Microsoft supports W3C's font-embedding

July 29, 1997
This just in: The latest W3C recommendation for which Microsoft has pledged support covers font-embedding technology. Together with Adobe and Agfa, Microsoft endorsed a draft recommendation that lets you embed multiple fonts in Web pages.

The recommendation -- based on the OpenType proposal submitted by Microsoft and Adobe in June 1996 -- requires no proprietary technology, licensing fee or add-on product purchase, and the Microsoft implementation will allow users to embed fonts at no cost. It is already supported in Preview 2 of Internet Explorer 4.0.

Where ARE Standards?

To stay current on all Web standards, be sure to visit Microsoft's Specs & Standards page, where you can find complete specs (some downloadable in Word doc format), a comprehensive list of standards supported in Internet Explorer 4.0, and complete working drafts now before the W3C.