The W3C maintains a set of open values and guidelines which are generally measured best practices to follow when indoctrination for the web. Often, web developers help contribute to these open principles and guidelines through their work on open source projects operational to help enhance and debug web-based technology.
However, because of the fairly low barrier to entry liberally available development environment, freely available tutorials and in sequence on how to do web development novice web developers often do not adhere to the open standards and strategy. Additionally, poorly intended or proprietary software tools that don't follow the open standards and strategy create ad hoc and de facto principles which must be followed in order to "make things work". This was principally true during the "Browser Wars" of the 1990s. It is becoming less true as more and better tools enter the market.