Other Standards & Specifications

Other technologies play a part in presentation, deployment, and functionality of electronic documents. 

Revision Note: This page has a long history. Recently it has been revised to remove obsolete material. Important but obsolete material has been de-linked.

• ACAP - Automated Content Access Protocol. The new open-source protocol enables publishers to make their content visible and distributable over the Internet, while attaching access policies.
• AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX is a modern way to make internet applications act more like stand-alone ones. AJAX allows the screen to update independently of a web server. For a good overview of AJAX and when to use it, see Javalobby's discussion.
  
• CDF Reference for Active Channels -- Obsolete with Microsoft's release if IE 7
• Document Object Model (DOM) -- the official Document Object Model (DOM) home page.
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification -- the official W3C specification for DOM, which allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents.
• Open Software Description (OSD) Overview -- an introduction to and home page for OSD, which describes software components and platforms.
• Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) -- the W3C specification for the PICS standard and its use for labeling metadata to be associated with Internet content, especially for privacy and creating filtering mechanisms to prevent children from viewing inappropriate content.
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax -- this site includes a primer on RDF, which is a foundation for processing metadata providing interoperability between applications that exchange information on the Web.
• W3C Data Formats -- prepared by Tim Berners-Lee, this site discusses some W3C data format specifications and their relationships to each other. Of mostly historical value.