A.3 Standards Organizations

Visit the International Organization for Standardization, a worldwide federation of national standards organizations, at http://www.iso.ch.

The World Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3.org oversees the specifications and guidelines for the technology of the World Wide Web. Check here for information about CSS, DOM, (X)HTML, MathML, XLink, XML, XPath, XPointer, XSL, and other web technologies.

The organization responsible for defining the Unicode character set can be visited at http://www.unicode.org.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is an international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML. See the web site at http://www.oasis-open.org.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is a less formal organization devoted to the creation of specifications for Internet information exchange. The IETF focuses primarily on protocols, notably HTTP, DNS, and SMTP. It also does some XML work in its MIME type efforts and through its BEEP protocol work. See the web site at http://www.ietf.org.