Standards and Specifications
What are standards?
Standards are published documents that establish specifications and procedures designed to ensure the reliability of the materials, products, methods, and services people use every day. Standards address a range of issues, including but not limited to various protocols that help ensure product functionality and compatibility, facilitate inter-operability and support consumer safety and public health.
Why are they important?
Standards form the fundamental building blocks for product development by establishing consistent protocols that can be universally understood and adopted. This helps fuel compatibility and interoperability and simplifies product development, and speeds time-to-market. Standards also make it easier to understand and compare competing products. As standards are globally adopted and applied in many markets, they also fuel international trade.
It is only through the use of standards that the requirements of inter-connectivity and inter-operability can be assured. It is only through the application of standards that the credibility of new products and new markets can be verified. In summary standards fuel the development and implementation of technologies that influence and transform the way we live, work and communicate.
Source: Inside the IEEE-SA, Standards at Work on 10/03/2011Web Technologies Standards
Standards and guidelines assist in optimization for search engines and screen readers. HTML5 semantic elements provide the mechanisms necessary to structure the page more easily for accessibility via screen readers. Search engines take advantage of HTML5 semantics by using the article element to determine the purpose of the page.
Elements, attributes, and attribute values in HTML are defined in the Specification, to have certain meanings (semantics). These definitions allow HTML processors, like web browsers and search engines, to present documents and applications consistently in different contexts.