POP3 and IMAP (Mail Retrieval Protocols)
The two protocols a mail client uses to fetch messages from a server: POP3, which downloads mail to one device, and IMAP, which keeps mailboxes on the server and synchronizes across devices.
Standards
The specifications that pinned the languages down - each tied to the standards body that issued it.
116 entries, all primary-sourced
OpenType
The cross-platform font format jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe from 1996, building on TrueType to hold both TrueType and PostScript Type 1 outlines plus advanced typographic layout features.
PNG
Portable Network Graphics, a lossless raster image format created as a patent-free replacement for GIF, specified in IETF RFC 2083 and later as a W3C Recommendation and ISO/IEC standard.
ECMAScript (ECMA-262)
The Ecma International standard, ECMA-262, that defines the JavaScript language; its first edition was published in June 1997.
Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)
Wireless LAN technology standardized as IEEE 802.11 in 1997, with the Wi-Fi Alliance later supplying the consumer brand and interoperability certification that made wireless networking ubiquitous.
Debian Free Software Guidelines
Debian's 1997 set of ten criteria defining what software qualifies as free; reused almost verbatim, they became the Open Source Definition.
The Debian Social Contract
Debian's binding public promise to its users and the free-software community, first published in 1997, which commits the project to remain free software and which contains the Debian Free Software Guidelines that later became the basis of the Open Source Definition.
The Open Source Definition
The Open Source Definition (OSD), derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines, is the ten-point standard a software license must satisfy to be called open source.
XML (Extensible Markup Language)
XML is a W3C-standardized, simplified subset of SGML for representing structured data as text. First published as a Recommendation in 1998, it defines well-formedness and optional validity, and became a universal interchange format on the web.
HTTPS and TLS
HTTPS is HTTP secured with TLS, the protocol that encrypts web traffic; it grew out of Netscape's SSL and was standardized by the IETF as TLS in 1999.
Java ME (J2ME)
Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME, later Java ME), introduced by Sun in 1999, was a cut-down Java platform whose CLDC configuration and MIDP profile let small Java applications, especially games, run on hundreds of millions of feature phones.
XML-RPC
XML-RPC is a simple protocol for making remote procedure calls over HTTP using XML to encode the calls and responses. Introduced by Dave Winer in 1998, it was a direct ancestor of SOAP and an influence on later web APIs.
XPath (XML Path Language)
XPath is the W3C expression language for addressing parts of an XML document by navigating its tree structure. Standardized in 1999, it underpins XSLT and XML querying and provides a compact, path-based syntax for selecting nodes.
XSLT (XSL Transformations)
XSLT is the W3C language for transforming XML documents into other XML, HTML, or text documents. Standardized in 1999, it is a declarative, rule-based language that uses XPath to select the parts of a source tree it transforms.
GNU Free Documentation License
The Free Software Foundation's copyleft license for manuals, textbooks, and other documentation, designed to keep written works free in the same way the GNU GPL keeps software free; historically the original license of Wikipedia.
YAML
YAML Ain't Markup Language, a human-friendly, indentation-based data serialization format widely used for configuration in tools like Kubernetes and CI systems.
XML Schema (XSD)
XML Schema (XSD) is the W3C XML-based schema language that succeeded DTDs for describing the structure and data types of XML documents. First a Recommendation in 2001, it is itself written in XML, supports namespaces, and adds a rich datatype system.
reStructuredText
The plaintext markup of the Python documentation world, parsed by Docutils and used by Sphinx, designed to be readable in the raw yet powerful enough for structured documents.
AsciiDoc
Stuart Rackham's richer plain-text markup for technical books and documentation, with a full toolchain centered on the Asciidoctor processor.
The Creative Commons License Suite
The standardized family of Creative Commons licenses, built from the Attribution, ShareAlike, NonCommercial, and NoDerivatives conditions, plus the CC0 public domain dedication; CC BY-SA is the copyleft option used by Wikipedia.
SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface)
SPI is a fast, full-duplex, four-wire serial bus that Motorola defined in the 1980s for connecting a processor to sensors, displays, and flash memory. A clock, two data lines, and a chip-select line let a controller and a target exchange bits in both directions at once, making SPI the high-speed counterpart to the two-wire I2C bus.
The ISC License
A simplified permissive license written by the Internet Systems Consortium, functionally equivalent to the MIT and 2-clause BSD licenses but with even more concise wording; widely used by OpenBSD and as the default for npm packages.
H.264 / AVC
H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 Advanced Video Coding, the most widely deployed video compression standard, jointly developed by ITU-T and MPEG and published as ITU-T H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10.
The Apache License 2.0
A permissive license published by the Apache Software Foundation that adds an explicit patent grant, contribution terms, and trademark and notice provisions to the basic permissive model.
Markdown
John Gruber's plain-text-to-HTML lightweight markup syntax, designed for readability, that became ubiquitous in READMEs, chat, and documentation.
SAML 2.0
The OASIS XML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization assertions between identity providers and service providers, long the backbone of enterprise single sign-on.
OpenDocument Format (ODF)
OpenDocument Format is the open, XML-based standard for office documents (.odt, .ods, .odp), each a ZIP package of XML parts. Approved as an OASIS Standard in 2005 and as ISO/IEC 26300 in 2006, it is the native format of LibreOffice and a vendor-neutral alternative to proprietary office files.
CSV
Comma-Separated Values, the ubiquitous tabular plain-text format documented by IETF RFC 4180, along with its quoting and escaping rules.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
The path-vector routing protocol that exchanges reachability between autonomous systems and stitches the independent networks of the internet into a single routing system.
Office Open XML (OOXML)
Office Open XML is the XML-based file format family behind .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx, in which an Office document is a ZIP package of XML parts. Standardized as Ecma-376 in 2006 and as ISO/IEC 29500 in 2008, its fast-tracked ISO approval was deeply controversial.
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
SOAP is an XML-based messaging protocol for exchanging structured information between web services, built around an envelope structure and a stack of WS-* extension specifications. It was a cornerstone of enterprise web services in the 2000s.
WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
WSDL is an XML format that describes a web service's operations, message types, and network endpoints, acting as the machine-readable contract that lets tools generate client and server code for SOAP services.
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
A weaker-copyleft GNU license, expressed as additional permissions on top of the GPL, that lets a covered library be linked into proprietary software while still requiring the library's own modifications to stay free.
The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)
A GNU copyleft license that extends the GPL to network-deployed software, requiring operators who modify a covered program and let users interact with it over a network to offer those users the program's source code.
OpenCL
The Open Computing Language, an open, royalty-free standard from the Khronos Group ratified in December 2008, for parallel programming across CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. OpenCL was the cross-vendor answer to NVIDIA's CUDA.
Apache Avro
A compact, schema-based binary serialization format that emerged from the Hadoop project in 2009, designed for efficient data exchange with built-in schema evolution.
RISC-V
The free and open instruction-set architecture begun at UC Berkeley in 2010, built around a small base integer ISA plus optional modular extensions, and maintained as a public standard by RISC-V International.
The Unlicense
A public-domain dedication for software that attempts to waive all copyright rather than license them; alongside Creative Commons CC0 it represents the most permissive end of the open source spectrum.
JSON-RPC
JSON-RPC is a lightweight, transport-agnostic remote procedure call protocol that encodes requests and responses as JSON objects. Its 2.0 version is widely used in tooling such as the Language Server Protocol and in blockchain node APIs like Ethereum.
WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface)
The Python standard interface between web servers and Python web applications or frameworks. First specified in PEP 333 (2003) and updated for Python 3 by PEP 3333 (2010), it decouples server choice from framework choice to promote application portability.
EditorConfig
EditorConfig is a simple file format, the .editorconfig file, plus editor plugins, that lets a project share basic coding-style settings such as indentation, character set, and whitespace handling across many different editors and IDEs.
Mozilla Public License (MPL)
A file-level 'weak copyleft' open-source license originating from Netscape's 1998 open-sourcing of its browser; MPL 2.0 keeps modified files under the license while allowing combination with other code.
OAuth 2.0
The authorization framework, defined in RFC 6749, that lets an application obtain limited delegated access to a user's resources without handling the user's password.
AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol)
AMQP is an open, binary, wire-level protocol for message-oriented middleware, designed so that messaging clients and brokers from different vendors can interoperate. AMQP 1.0 became an OASIS Standard in 2012 and was later adopted as an ISO/IEC standard.
TOML
Tom's Obvious Minimal Language, a configuration file format created by Tom Preston-Werner that maps unambiguously to a hash table.
Apache Parquet
The open, column-oriented on-disk storage format created by Twitter and Cloudera in 2013 for efficient analytics, which became the de facto standard file format for data lakes.
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight text-based data-interchange format standardized as ECMA-404 and IETF RFC 8259.
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
A browser mechanism, defined by the WHATWG Fetch standard, that uses Access-Control HTTP headers and preflight requests to safely relax the same-origin policy for web APIs.