Web standards, in the broader sense, consist of the following:
- Recommendations published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)[2]
- Internet standard (STD) documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
- Request for Comments (RFC) documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force [3]
- Standards published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) [4]
- Standards published by Ecma International (formerly ECMA) [5]
- The Unicode Standard and various Unicode Technical Reports (UTRs) published by the Unicode Consortium [6]
- Name and number registries maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) [7]
It is crucial to distinguish those specifications that are under development from the ones that already reached the final development status (in case of W3C specifications, the highest maturity level).[8]