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Many different interpretations exist for the term “Web standards.” People overuse this term, creating confusion regarding its real meaning. “Web standards” can refer to the actual specification of how a language or technology works. An industry standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), produces these specifications. "Web standards” can also describe the techniques of applying the language or technology as recommended by the standards body. These are essentially “best practices” or a development philosophy. One example of this is the strict separation of structural markup from visual presentation using cascading stylesheets (CSS). There have been accepted industry Web standards and best practices for mobile development in place since the late ‘90s. The currently accepted mobile standards continue to evolve along with mobile devices. However, mobile devices throughout the world vary in how they render content. This resembles the differences between Netscape and Internet Explorer in the late ‘90s or even Firefox and Internet Explorer today. However, the mobile device space is more fragmented: instead of having a few major mobile browsers, there are many different many browser types and thousands of variants. The good news is that of all the various browsers, many are simply variations of a previous version. The inconsistency between the browsers is often minimal and not worth the effort to work around. The bad news is that this problem is not likely to disappear any time soon. For as long as software comes built-in the device from its manufacturer, it’s difficult to upgrade. This is especially true for lower-end phones that do not normally allow you to update the built-in applications. The resulting rendering inconsistencies will likely continue as an annoyance for years to come. That said, this situation will improve as time passes, just as it did with desktop browsers. With increasing adoption, mobile browser developers will continue to improve their browsers, helping stabilize the situation. Furthermore, there is now a broad consensus on the Web standards that should be supported by mobile browsers and support for this baseline set of standards is improving all of the time. This section of the guide focuses on the most important mobile standards including XHTML-Basic and Wireless CSS. http://dev.mobi/node/316
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