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From: James Pickering
Date: Jun 26, 2005 8:50PM

The ISO -- International Organization for Standardization -- consists of the national standards institutes of 151 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland. It promulgates, develops and maintains world wide technical standards.

Note that the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) only makes recommendations -- it is the ISO that publishes standards.

The International standard for HTML is prescribed by the Document https://www.cs.tcd.ie/15445/15445.html and the Users Guide for ISO/IEC 15445:2000 (ISO-HTML) is at https://www.cs.tcd.ie/15445/UG.HTML

Features of ISO-HTML .....

1. The hierarchy of the header elements (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 H6) is rigidly enforced. For example, H2 is not allowed to precede H1 at any place in a document.

2. HEIGHT and WIDTH parameters for IMG must be designated in style sheets.

3. Numerous W3C HTML 4.01 elements are refined in ISO-HTML.

4. Numerous W3C HTML 4.01 attributes are omitted from the standard or their use is restricted as outlined in the following quote from the Users Guide ..... "The W3C Recommendation for HTML 4.01 provides a number of attributes that are not supported by the International Standard. They have been omitted because they are used to describe appearance rather than structure, or because the feature is considered to be still too unstable or immature for an International Standard."

5. The Standard separates content from presentation as delineated in the following quote from the Users Guide ....... "The International Standard is based on the well established principle that it is good document design to separate the content of a document from the intended style in which it is to be presented to a reader ..... "

6. The methodology for accomplishing presentation is outlined in the following quote from the Users Guide ..... "Although the International Standard does not specify a style sheet language, this User's Guide recommends that authors of ISO-HTML documents use Cascading Style Sheets as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium."

7. Style sheets must be linked -- embedded style constructs are not allowed.

James Pickering
Pickering Pages
http://www.jp29.org/