Standards are a big deal in any field where your work needs to interact with other people's work. Imagine what it would be like working in the building industry if nobody could agree on how long a millimetre was supposed to be. Imagine the chaos it'd create if everybody had their own definition of how long a minute was. With computers, a lot rides on having published standards.
Say, for example, you wanted to have a world-wide-web, where a bunch of different companies created web-browsers, and they all had to render pages made by millions of different individuals from all over the world. Well, what you might do is publish a set of standards that everybody could work from. If you were clever, you might even call it "HTML v1.0". The clever bit about having that number on the end is that if technology progressed, and at some point you decided your HTML spec needed to be modified, updated, or added to, you could then publish a different spec called "HTML v1.1" or "HTML v2.0". That way, browser-makers could advertise which set of standards their browsers supported, and website-makers could include little sections in their web-pages that told the browsers what version of the specs they were working from.
Of course, in the real world, things rarely go that smooth. For example, there might be arguments over who controls a standard. This may result in two or more groups publishing competing standards. Some web-browser makers may find it hard to implement some parts of a standard, and so leave them out, while other browser makers may implement and promote features that aren't in the standard. You might even end up with a situation where you have a "living" standard, which means stuff is always being added and taken away, but no definitive versions are ever published.
Look, basically, this is my long-winded way of saying that I was going over some of my old posts today, and I noticed that some of the pages weren't rendering properly. This is because, a while ago, I started using some HTML stuff that web-browsers are apparently no longer supporting, and since I can't see myself being bothered going back through years of posts to fix everything, I just thought I should warn you guys, if you're going back to look for something, well, expect some weirdness.
That is all.
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