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I’ve been stuck at w3.org for days now — nay, weeks, perhaps. You may know w3.org as the World Wide Web consortium, the group responsible for virtually all (if not absolutely all?) of the web standards which make the web work. If that weren’t enough, it was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

As a sideline… have some people forgotten that “World Wide Web” was not just a quaint way the media began to refer to the Internet? Of course, the Web and “the Internet” are not even synonymous…. The World Wide Web is an application that runs on top of the Internet, specifically on the http protocol — but anyways, that is what it is. But you probably knew all that already; let’s go on.

I was recently wanting to dig a little deeper into CSS, DOM, and related technologies. What to do? Well, you could always spend a small fortune at Amazon, or you could spend a buck fifty on coffee at your local bookstore and spend the whole day reading Zeldman, Meyer, and the Rhino book. Then again, there’s always your local library, as long as you’re okay with books that were published five or six years ago.

Or, you could jet on over to w3.org and simply read the CSS2 standard recommendation.

Rusty on exactly what XHTML “strict” entails? Which DTD to use for your new web page, and why? You can read the XHTML recommendation, hot off the presses. Is that not enough for you? Just dive right into the XHTML Strict DTD itself. Even if you don’t “know” XML inside and out, an XML DTD is a surprisingly readable document.

Speaking of the XHTML DTD, if you do decide to browse through it (please don’t tell me I’m the only one hare-brained enough to do such things), you will see a cryptic looking “word” littering the document: i18n. It happens that this seems to be one of the few things I retained from reading XML in a Nutshell a few years back. “i18n” is an abbreviation for “internationalization,” for the simple reason that there are 18 letters between the “i” and the “n” in said word, and face it: “i18n” is a lot easier to type that “internationalization.”

So, all that preamble out of the way… there is a veritable virtual ton of other interesting recommendations and other documents over at w3.org.

• Ubiquitous Web Applications
• The Semantic Web
• The Web API Working Group, which concerns technologies such as the XMLHttpRequest Object, among other things.
• Web Application Formats Working Group
• There’s even a Widgets 1.0 working document.

Yeah, it just goes on and on. If you are even remotely any sort of web geek, this is a great resource. Of course, if you are any sort of web geek, you are most likely already familiar with what can generally be found at w3.org; but if you’re anything like me, you probably never bothered to read very much of it. IMHO, it’s well worth the (minimal) effort, and certainly cheaper than a spending spree at Amazon.