What Are Open Standards?
Open specification (not owned) e.g. HTML (but not RTF - or Java?)
Avoids patented technologies (e.g. GIF) - dangers of rights being sold
Freely available implementations (open source) as well as commercial implementations (cf. Web browsers and servers)
Cross-platform browsers and servers (distributed architecture)
Extensible - future-proof, so still usable when something new arrives
Distributed (inter-operable)