Standards Compliance

Definition: How well a web browser implements the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published standards and guidelines is directly related to its ability to access current and future web resources.

Measurable Evaluation Criteria: The W3C publishes all recommendations (standards) on its web site. There are also test tools and conformance information available in a quality assurance matrix. It should also be noted that many Internet Standards published by the IETF also apply. Even with all of these validators and test suites available, it may be hard to produce overall summaries for each browser. Also a consideration is how quickly a browser is able to adopt standards as they are formalized.