common coding system

a standard for use in an enterprise, to ensure that all documents will have specific information in a specific format.

an example is a properly constructed html/xhtml site.
the pages meet the doctype specifications, so they are using the w3c reccomendations as the standard to meet.
the following is valid html according to w3c recommendations, prior to january 29 2000.
since then html istels has been depreciated for xhtml.

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
< html >
< head >
< title >banner< /title >
< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" >