Standards Information

This page is no longer actively maintained

RFCs

The Internet Engineering Task Force including its tao.

RFCs are readily available and are a key source of information. The authoritative source for RFCs is the rfc-editor. IETF drafts and descriptive abstracts are at IETF.

Ethernet

Thanks to some commercial sponsorship, the IEEE is making many of the IEEE 802 standards available for free download. The latest versions are still chargeable but after three months or so even those are made available.

ECMA

ECMA remains a key source of standards, all made freely available, including a CD set of all ECMA standards and technical notes, released twice a year.

Sources for WWW and CGI information

Official Specifications
- CGI at NCSA
- MIME (RFC1341)
- HTML at W3 World Wide Web Consortium
- HTML 2.0 and 3.0 at UCI
- Netscape extensions to HTML
- HTTP 1.0 at W3
- URL at W3
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) is being developed by W3C
  - There is also an XML FAQ
- XLL (XML Language Linking Extension) expands on unidirectional hyper-links
- XSL (Extensible Style Language) describes the format for XML style sheets
Web authoring guides
- Unicode explanantion from Joel on Software
- The US consultancy User Interface Engineering presented a study at the ACM usability conference CHI99 showing that most corporate web sites are ineffective because of design flaws and excessive complexity.
- CNET has several useful resources, in particular Builder.com.
- Web Design Group's HTML help site
- Warren Steel's Hints for Web Authors
- Web Reference
- .net's Web Builder Tutorials
- Lynda Weinman's browser safe palette for cross-platform colour stability
- Web Page Design For Designers
- W3C published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in May 1999. It would be good if all web sites considered these guidelines in their design. Available at http://www.w3.org/.
- Finally, Netcraft surveys Web server software usage.
WWW Server information
- Apache

This page is maintained by Martin Ansdell-Smith
using GNU vi and RCS.
Last modified $Date: 2006/07/12 11:39:19 $.