Web interoperability

Web interoperability means producing web pages viewable in standard compatible web browsers, various operating systems such as Windows, Macintosh and Linux and devices such as PC, PDA and mobile phone based on the latest web standards.

History

This term was originated by the Web Interoperability Pledge that is a promise to adhere to current HTML Recommendations as promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The WIP was not a W3C initiative. but it was started by and has been run by ZDNet AnchorDesk quite independently.

This issue was known by cross browsing in browser war between Internet Explorer and Netscape. Windows Internet Explorer was the dominant browser after that, but modern web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari have supported web standards. Because of backward compatibility of Internet Explorer, many web pages has supported non-standard HTML tags and DOM handling script yet as well platform-dependent techniques such as ActiveX. These are very harmful for Web accessibility and Device Independence.

Elements of Web interoperability

• Structural and semantic markup with XHTML.
• CSS based layout with layout elements such as position and float.
• Separating among structure, presentation and behavior in web pages.
• DOM scripting based on W3C DOM Standard and ECMAScript.

Activities

It has been various activities, for example Web Standards Project, Mozilla's Technology Evangelism and Web Standards Group. Also there are educational activities such as Web Essential Conference.

See also

• Web accessibility
• Computer accessibility
• Wikipedia:Accessibility
• Device Independence
• Multimodal interaction

• Cross browsing
• Forward compatibility
• Backward compatibility
• graceful degradation

Local Activities

• Web Standards Korea