Essential International Standards and Registries for Web Developers

- Programming, Quality Assurance, Security

Last revision:

Radiating business woman

The following is a collection of free international standards, registries and references that I collected throughout the years while developing websites and web services. These references, while very precise and technical by their nature, are extremely useful in order to ensure that a specific implementation is actually correct, and to mitigate unexpected interoperability between systems on the Internet.

As it's not always clear how a technology is used based on its name or acronym, I included the primary use case for each reference along with its name and/or acronym.

Also, many of these standards are built over each other, and as such I tried to list them in that order as much as possible while maintaining clarity.

Real world stuff

The following provides IDs and critical information about worldwide social, political and cultural concepts often referenced.

Plain text

The following explains how text is handled by a computer.

Note that the most popular character encoding is UTF-8, a superset of ASCII.

IP adresses

The following explains how computers can identify and talk to each other on the Internet.

Domain names

The following explains how to find information about a particular domain on the Internet, including the IP adresses of its services.

Note that host names are domain names on which a website can be hosted.

TLS

The following explains how an encrypted connection can be established between two machines over a network.

Note that SSL is an obsolete technology that was superseded by TLS.

Emails

The following explains how emails work.

Note that Pluralsight subscribers can watch my course Configuring and Managing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, which cover some of these topics.

XML

The following explains how to use XML, a data format that forms the base of all web pages.

Note that newer versions of XML and XPath exist, but are seldom used.

Note that I am not including SOAP and WSDL as these technologies are obsolete, and most API providers that do use them generally offer better alternatives alongside them.

JSON

The following explains how to use JSON, a common data format commonly used by websites.

URLs

The following explains how to interpret URLs.

HTTP

The following explains how web clients interact with websites.

Static web

The following explains how to write a web page.

Note that RSS is an obsolete technology that was superseded by Atom.

Programming

The following explains how to write and automatically interact with dynamic web pages. Note that some API implementations are already described in the HTML definition listed in the previous section.

Metadata

The following describes non-standard HTML meta tags found on the Internet. Note that standard ones are documented in the HTML specifications.

Data access management

The following explains how websites should manage secure data, including cases where authentication is done by a third-party.

End-to-end security

The following allows people to share highly-sensitive information securely.

Accessibility

The following explains how to write web pages to be accessible for people with disabilities.

Markdown

The following defines a humanly-readable plain text format that can be easily converted to hypertext with tools.

Other common data formats

The following defines a few other common data formats that can be found on the web.

Related articles I wrote

Slippery road signs scattered everywhere

Scrum Is Not Agile

- Programming, Business, Psychology

While there is no denying that Scrum revolutionized the software industry for the better, it may seem a little strange to read about someone that dislikes it despite strongly agreeing with the Agile Manifesto, considering the creator of Scrum was one of its signers. However, after having experienced…
Assembled cog wheels

Validating and Viewing OpenAPI Definitions with Docker

- Quality Assurance, Programming

Here are a few commands I crafted to validate and easily read API definitions in the OpenAPI format, using Docker and open source tools provided by Swagger. I have yet to convert them into proper shell scripts, but I hope these will be helpful nonetheless. The commands are designed to be run in a…
Illusion of Gaia logo

Beating Illusion of Gaia in 17 Minutes

- Video Games, Security

I crafted a tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) of the Super NES action-adventure game Illusion of Gaia (also known as Illusion of Time in Europe) which beats the game as fast as possible on the American version. The final time is 16:48 when using TAS timing (from initial power on to the last input) and…
Spaceship flying over active volcanoes

A Universe and World Creation Script for Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition

- Tabletop RPGs, Programming

The following is a Python script developed by yours truly to generate a sector according to the core rulebook of the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition tabletop RPG, exactly as described in the Universe and World Creation chapter. It is designed to describe worlds in human-readable format as much as…
Medusa in fiery scenery

Deep Learning in Python with PyTorch - Tutorial and Demo

- Programming, Mathematics

As I am continuing my personal journey into deep learning research and development, I wanted to try out PyTorch, a machine learning framework with GPU acceleration primarily designed for the Python programming language. However, I couldn't find any good introductory resource online for it. So I read…

See all of my articles