About W3C web standards

Web standards are the building blocks of the web. They are the blue prints of how to implement browsers, blogs, graphic editors, search engines, and many more software that power our experience on the web.

They enable developers to build rich interactive experiences that can be available on any device.

What are Web standards?

W3C Recommendations are standards.

W3C publishes documents that define Web technologies. These documents follow a process designed to promote consensus, fairness, public accountability, and quality. At the end of this process, W3C publishes Recommendations, which are considered Web standards.

W3C documents and future web standards

W3C publishes several types of documents that are not standards.

Discover the types of documents W3C publishes

Input to the W3C standards process may come from a variety of places, including:

The Strategy incubation pipeline documents the exploration of potential new work in phases of Incubation and Evaluation, and eventually in the chartering stages of new standards groups.

Public input is welcome at any stage but particularly once Incubation has begun. This helps W3C identify work that is sufficiently incubated to warrant standardization, to review the ecosystem around the work and indicate interest in participating in its standardization, and then to draft a charter that reflects an appropriate scope. Ongoing feedback can speed up the overall standardization process.

Referring to W3C specifications

Each W3C Technical Report has several URIs associated with it, located at the beginning of the document:

  1. A "this version" URI, which identifies the specific document. 
  2. A "latest published version" URI, which identifies the most recently published draft in a document series.
  3. An "Editor's Draft" URI, which may or may not have review from the Working Group.

If you mean to refer to a specific version of a document, please use the "this version" URI. If you need to refer to "the most up-to-date version", please use the "latest published version" URI. If you need to refer to the version of the document which the group is currently iterating on, please use the "Editor's Draft" URI. For more information, see Version Management in W3C Technical Reports. 

W3C persistence policy

According to W3C persistence policy, W3C will make every effort to make a given document indefinitely available, in its original form, at its "this version" URI.

W3C may correct broken markup and broken links in place (per the in-place modification policy) but otherwise will make every effort not to change content after publication of a document.

Comments on W3C specifications

Each W3C Technical Report includes a "Status of this document" section near the front. In this section, you will find information about where to send comments.

Re-using a Standard or part thereof for a book (or other purpose)

See the W3C Document license for answers to questions about copyright.

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