Web Standards

Why are web standards important?
Standards allow a programmer to learn one set of APIs that will work in any standards compliant browser. This means they can program a website once and it will work in any browser. Today all of the browsers are not 100% compliant but they are getting closer. Most of the new browsers already support the new HTML 5 spec. HTML 5 and CSS3 are expected to be ratified later this year. This new standard brings with it many new features that will make it even easier for developers to create dynamic, great looking websites. Even Microsoft is going to support most of the new features with IE 9.

Visit this site to see how your browser scores with HTML 5 http://html5test.com/

History
When the web was first invented there was no official standards body. It was like the wild west in the browser market. Each browser maker would add their own new features without even thinking about sharing the specs with their competitors. You might be thinking that all this competition and new features is great for consumers. Well in most markets that is true but in this case the browser is not really the end product - the websites are and all the disparate features makes creating the websites almost impossible. A developer would have to keep learning all of the special features for each browser and how to program for each browser. This takes way too much time and money and it was stagnating the web. We finally got web standards with version 2.0 of HTML in 1995 thanks to the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee and the HTML Working Group . It wasn't until 1997 that HTML 3.2 was released by the W3C. This is considered by many to be the first true standards spec.