76. The W3C and Standardizing the Web

Code[ish]

Chris Castle, a Developer Advocate with Heroku, is joined by Tobie Langel, a longtime web developer and member of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. The W3C is an organization where the standards that define the web are being built. It's a consortium of different industry players, like browser vendors,universities, and governments. These different stakeholders come together and decide how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript API should behave. The W3C effectively lays the groundwork for browsers to agree on how a website should look and behave.

They do this through long, thought out processes of standardization. If each browser ends up implementing its own HTML tags or CSS rules, then the web would become fragmented, as sites would require you to use a specific browser. For something to become a W3C recommendation, two different browsers with different code bases need to successfully implement a specification. This is done to build confidence around an idea, to ensure that browser vendors understand it, as well as to identify ways which frontend developer will make use of the new technology. Much of the conversation between Tobie and Chris goes over how, exactly, this timeline works in practice.

Links from this episode

• W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web
• Specref is an open source database of web standards
• PR Preview adds preview and diff to spec pull requests.