Hypertext Page Transfer Standards Standards Protocols must be consistent to be effective. Therefore, standards are agreed upon and published.
Standards are the things that make the Internet work.
Almost always they take the form of protocols that everyone has agreed on. Role of Standards Standardized protocols provide a common meeting ground for software designers. Without standards, it is unlikely that an IBM computer could transfer files from a Macintosh, or print to a NetWare server, or login to a Sun. The technical literature of the Internet consists primarily of standard protocols that define how software and hardware from wildly divergent sources can interact on the net. Sources of Standards Standards come in two flavors - de facto and de jure .