Firefox and Compliance with Web Standards

Does Firefox comply with all the web standards? No. But then, neither does Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, or any other web browser! No browser is 100% compliant with the standards.

It is my hope that Firefox is better than other browsers with regard to the standards. And, maybe it is. However, there is a lot of subjectivity in that it is often a case of comparing apples to oranges with compliance and standards. One browser complies with standard A, and the other with B. Which is better? Standard A is different from standard B, so they cannot be meaningfully compared.

First, what are these mythical standards? There is no government-appointed web standards organization the Internet is strictly hands off with regard to the government (and that includes any government!). Instead, these standards come from many places. General Internet standards are set by the following:

• Internet Architecture Board (IAB)

• Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

• The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)

• RFC Editor (requests for comments describe how Internet standards are created)

That's a lot of alphabetic soup and this list is not exhaustive. However, for web standards, a few organizations are critical to our usage of the Web. The main web standards authority is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

W3C defines standards, including

• Cascading Style Sheets CSS is used to add styles for web HTML documents. With CSS, you can set styles and override existing styles as desired.

• DOM Document object model.

• Extensible Hypertext Markup Language XHTML is the next step beyond HTML. Looked at as simply as possible, XHTML is HTML wrapped in XML.

• Extensible Markup Language XML is a data format that enables the intelligent transfer of information from one point to another.

• Hypertext Markup Language HTML is the primary language standard for the Web. There are three main versions of HTML: 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. There are subreleases of these versions as well.

• Internationalization Deals with differences in locations, such as language.

• Uniform resource identifier URIs are sometimes called uniform resource locators (URLs), but the correct term is URI.

• Web Services Description Language WSDL uses XML to transfer data or procedures between two points.

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, we are most interested in CSS and the DOM inspector.