Web Commerce Security Design and Development

APPENDIX B

Standardization and Regulatory Bodies

The International Organization for Standardization provides a good explanation of why standardization is useful:

Standards make an enormous and positive contribution to most aspects of our lives. Standards ensure desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability — and at an economical cost. When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous. When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards.¹

Standardization is good, and it is necessary, but choosing which standard to follow is a subjective matter. That is, depending on the task in hand, some standards might be more suitable than others.² This appendix lists the important standardization and regulatory bodies for the Web, Web commerce, and security technologies, ordered alphabetically. Obviously this is by no means an exhaustive list: Searching Google for “web standards” returns about 26 million results. Furthermore this appendix is not meant to endorse, agree, or disagree with objectives of any standards: We're just mentioning the entities and standards ...