Standards-compliant is a term often used in describing websites and user agents' (often web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and...
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
(W3C); also used for emphasizing that one doesn't use proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
In object-oriented programming, a method is a subroutine associated with a class. Methods define the behavior to be exhibited by instances of the associated class at program run time...
Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...
. Although there is no perfect browser that seamlessly adheres to all standards at the time being, huge advancement has been made by several major web browsers (such as Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
) in the past few years that will ensure better interoperability in the future.
Current use of the term "standards-compliance" generally refers to the adherence to coding practices in relation to the use of HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
(CSS) to define the layout, colors, and fonts of a web page. The Web Standards Project
Web Standards Project
The Web Standards Project is a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies....
(WaSP) is a group, mainly composed of experienced web developers, whose mission is to encourage the use of these standards globally. Their recent efforts have been to promote the use of and adherence to the CSS 2.0 web standard by browsers, including how browsers respond to invalid markup and styles. The tests developed by WaSP are called Acid1
Acid1
Acid1, originally called the Box Acid Test, is a test page for web browsers. It was developed in October 1998 and was important in establishing baseline interoperability between early web browsers, especially for the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 specification...
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
, with each testing CSS1, CSS2, and CSS2+ (CSS2 + Client-Side Scripting), respectively.
Purpose
The purpose of the CSS 2.0 web standard is to keep data separate from its format, to maximize portability and interoperability. To see how the CSS 2.0 standards could be applied, consider the following HTML:
Horses
These magnificent creatures can...
In this example, the data is not separated from its formatting. To make this example CSS 2.0 compliant, the above code would look something like this:
style.css:
h1 { color: lime; text-align: center; }
p { color: yellow; background-color: black; }
index.html:
<h1>Horses</h1>
<p>These magnificent creatures can...</p>
In this example, you can see that the data has been separated from its formatting, so it's easy to tell that the colors and alignment are not related to the data at all, but are only used for formatting. All browsers that are 100% CSS 2.0 compliant should display the latter example (almost) identically.
Modern web browsers currently under development, or recently released (Opera 10
Opera 10
Opera 10 is a version of the Opera web browser. The initial version, 10.00, was released in September 2009.This release added a variety of new features, a new skin designed by Jon Hicks, increased standards support, and a new application icon to Opera...
Mozilla Firefox 4 is a version of the Firefox web browser, released on 22 March 2011. The first beta was made available on 6 July 2010; Release Candidate 2 was released on 18 March 2011. It was codenamed Tumucumaque, and has been confirmed as Firefox's last large release cycle...
Windows Internet Explorer 9 is the current version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT. Internet Explorer 9 supports several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and...
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
) fully support the CSS 2.0 standard, as well as some of the CSS 3.0 standards.
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Aspects of the DOM may be addressed and manipulated within the syntax of the programming language in use...
