Essential International Standards and Registries for Web Developers
- Programming, Quality Assurance, Security
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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.
Plain text
The following explains how plain text is handled by a computer.
- Character ID list (Unicode)
- Character encoding list for general use
- Character encoding list for web pages
- Binary data encoded as plain text (Base64)
Note that the most popular character encoding is UTF-8, a superset of ASCII.
Real world stuff
The following provides IDs and critical information about worldwide social, political and cultural concepts often referenced.
- Country code ISO database (ISO 3166 codes)
- Country code United Nations list (M49)
- Currency code list (ISO 4217 codes)
- Language code list (ISO 639 codes)
- Language tags
- Matching language tags
- Language subtag list
- Language tag extension list
- Phone numbering (E.164)
- Phone numbers notation (E.123)
- Time zone database
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.
- Host name original definition
- Host name extended definition (section 2.1)
- Domain names (DNS) part 1
- Domain names (DNS) part 2
- Wildcards in domain names
- Domain name resource record types (RR TYPEs) list
- International domain names 2003 version (IDNA2003) part 1
- International domain names 2003 version (IDNA2003) part 2
- International domain names 2003 version (IDNA2003) part 3
- International domain names 2003 version (IDNA2003) part 4
- International domain names 2008 version (IDNA2008) part 1
- International domain names 2008 version (IDNA2008) part 2
- International domain names 2008 version (IDNA2008) part 3
- International domain names 2008 version (IDNA2008) part 4
- International domain names 2008 version (IDNA2008) contextual rules list
- Reading international domain names during transition (UTS #46)
- Special domain name list
- Domain name root zone list
- Domain name public suffix list
TLS
The following explains how an encrypted connection can be established between two machines over a network.
- Sharing public encryption keys (X.509 certificates) (often misnamed "SSL certificates")
- Secure communication protocol (TLS)
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.
- Email base definition
- Required email adresses
- Emails with multiple senders
- Email extensions part 1
- Email extensions part 2
- Email extensions part 3
- International emails
- Email message header list
- Domain-based email sources authorization (SPF)
- Updating email source during forwarding (SRS)
- Cryptographic signatures on emails (DKIM)
- Cryptographic signatures on emails (DKIM) parameter list
- Domain-based email authentication policy (DMARC)
- Email authentication for international emails
- End-to-end encryption of messages
- End-to-end encryption of messages parameter lists
- Transmission of emails (SMTP)
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.
- XML 1.0
- Navigating XML documents (XPath 1.0)
- Defining XML schemas (XSD) part 1
- Defining XML schemas (XSD) part 2
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.
- HTTP/1.1
- HTTP/2
- HTTP method list
- HTTP status code list
- HTTP header list
- Cookies
- APIs using HTTP (REST)
- Defining REST APIs (OpenAPI) (often misnamed "Swagger")
Web pages
The following explains how to write a web page.
- Media type list
- Web document representation (DOM)
- Fetching web resources (Fetch)
- Hypertext (HTML)
- Mathematical formulas (MathML)
- Plain text to hypertext original definition (Markdown)
- Plain text to hypertext standardized definition (CommonMark)
- Styling (CSS)
- High-level programming (ECMAScript) (often misnamed "JavaScript")
- API to communicate from web client to server (XMLHttpRequest)
- API to communicate between web clients (WebRTC)
- News feeds (Atom) (often misnamed "RSS")
- Restricting unauthorized content (CSP)
- Test automation (WebDriver)
Note that RSS is an obsolete technology that was superseded by Atom.
Metadata
The following describes non-standard HTML meta tags found on the Internet. Note that standard ones are documented in the HTML specifications.
- Meta tags understood by Facebook (Open Graph)
- Meta tags understood by Twitter
- Publicly-known non-standard meta tag list
Data access management
The following explains how websites should manage secure data, including cases where authentication is done by a third-party.
- Usernames and passwords containing international characters
- HTTP authentication scheme list
- One-time passwords (OTP)
- Time-based one-time passwords (TOTP)
- Passwordless authentication (WebAuthn)
- Passwordless authentication (WebAuthn) attestation statement formats and extensions
- XML-based single sign-on (SAML)
- JSON-based authorization (OAuth 2.0)
- JSON-based authorization (OAuth 2.0) bearer tokens
- JSON-based authorization (OAuth 2.0) parameter list
- JSON-based identity validation (OpenID Connect)
Accessibility
The following explains how to write web pages to be accessible for people with disabilities.
- Accessibility guidelines for web pages (WCAG)
- Adding accessibility information to web pages (ARIA)
- Recommendations on adding accessibility information to web pages
- Implicit accessibility information in HTML
Other common data formats
The following defines a few other common data formats that can be found on the web.
- Semantic version numbering: An optional but common convension for defining versions of applications.
- YAML: A superset of JSON designed to be generally more easily readable by humans compared to JSON, with the drawback of being extremely complex.
- ZIP: Archives several files together with optional compression.
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