Throughout the development of the Internet there have been many definitions given to the standards that govern the many languages involved in displaying the contents of a website. While it’s quite easy to define the standards it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce or even teach them to the growing numbers of people with the ability to edit websites. The so-called ‘Web 2.0’ movement, allowing people to create websites without knowing how to write them, is creating many problems precisely because people are creating websites without understanding what it is that they are doing.

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HyperText Markup Language is the traditional language of the Internet. HTML is not a language in the same way programmers use programming languages. It is a markup language, and strictly speaking it only consists of text and information about that text. It tells a browser how to render text, and has since its creation been expanded to allow browsers to display images. The limitations of the language may not be clear from this, but it cannot for example handle any sort of login system or dynamic changes to pages. For this reason other web technologies exist, and the divisions between the work done on the server side and on the client side become abundantly clear and are worthy of examination.

The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is the main body responsible for setting the standards for these technologies. It produces documents, called Document Type Definitions, detailing what is and isn’t valid for each version of HTML. Considering HTML is currently on version 4.01 this might seem like an easy task. However, it covers three distinct types of HTML (Strict, Transitional and Frameset) and manages many other web technologies. They currently have recommendations for 29 different web technologies, many with variants similar to HTML. The Document Type Definitions are the benchmark of legitimacy for websites, and it is in this way they are evaluated as being valid or invalid. Users of sites such as MySpace often invalidate their sites because of a lack of knowledge of these standards.