Internet Standards

Internet Standards are statements about how the Internet should optimally work. Their purpose is to maximize the reliability of the Internet and ensure its continuity and security as circumstances and technologies change. Standards are generally protocols widely held to be beneficial to the technical operations of the Internet. Typically, they concern interoperability among different types of hardware, software, and programming languages, ensuring that they work harmoniously, as well as the results of networking-related research. This entry discusses the purpose of Internet Standards, the process of developing them, and disputes that have arisen over them.

Standards allow users to be sure that different forms of software are compatible, guarantee the functionality of hypertext markup language and extensible markup language, and ensure that webpages are easily readable, products ...