The Official Documentation Defining the Web

Index Page

Overview

A brief description of the different organizations working (sometimes at cross-purposes) to define Web standards. This document does not list the standards, but instead describes the organizations setting standards, and their mandates.

HTML Specifications

A list of documents defining the current "standard" version of HTML. Also given are lists of documents defining common proprietary HTML extensions, as well as those describing proposed standards-based improvements.

HTTP Specifications

A list of documents defining the current "standard" version of HTTP. Also given are lists of documents describing proposed extensions to HTTP, and possible models for the "next generation" of the protocol.

URL Specifications

A list of documents defining the URL specification and the specific forms for the different URL schemes (http, telnet, ftp, etc.) Also mentioned are documents proposing new URL schemes.

URI, URN and URC Specifications

A list of documents defining the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), URN (Uniform Resource Name) and URC (Uniform Resource Characteristics). A URI is a general framework for all Internet naming schemes -- thus URLs, URNs and URCs are all URIs.

Stylesheet Langauge Specifications

A list of documents defining the different stylesheet languages,and their relationships to HTML.

Language and Country Codes

A list of resources that define the special ASCII codes used to specify languages and countries. These are used within HTML to define document languages (as part of the Internationliation efforts), and are passed within the HTTP protocol to indicate the language of a resource, or the preferred language of a user-agent (browser).

Character Sets and Character Set Identifiers (In preparation)

A list of resources that specify the special ASCII codes used to indicate character sets. Also given is a list of resources that define the properties of different character sets.

Email and MIME Specifications

A list of resources that specify the format for Internet mail messages and for MIME-encoded Internet mail messages. This includes a document that explains how to officially register a new Internet Media (MIME) type.

Related Issues

There are several other issues that are "not quite standards", but that are important to inderstanding the ongoing developments of Web technologies. Some examples are:

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) --
With which the formal HTML language is defined
Extensible Markup Language (XML) --
An attempt at defining an SGML dialect that can be easily extended without an SGML Document Type Definition (DTD). Information is found at:

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-xml.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-sgml-wg/ -- W3C SGML Discusion list
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/SGML/Activity -- W3C SGML Activity page
news:comp.text.sgml -- SGML Newsgroup

Character sets and character entity names --
What are all those character sets, and how do they work?
Internationalization -- What are all the issues involved in making a software application work in a multilingual/multiple character set environment?

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