⚡ Standards in South Africa

Web standards are a set of guidelines and specifications that define and describe various aspects of the World Wide Web.

South Africa is an African country with a population of over 60 million people.

According to our statistics, standards are used on 89.9% of websites from South Africa.

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the top standards on websites in South Africa in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is HTML with an impressive share of 95%, followed by CSS with 94.9% and Open Graph with 56.3%.

HTML 95%
CSS 94.9%
Open Graph 56.3%
JSON 55.2%
RSD 49.6%
DNS Prefetch 46.5%
SearchAction 38.1%
XFN 30.6%
Preconnect 29.5%
Preload 25.2%
Pingback 23%
Speculation Rules 19.7%
XHTML 4.1%
YAML 3.3%
Prefetch 1.9%

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top standards that are more popular in South Africa than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

1. HTML ^(-1)
8. XFN ^(-2)
11. Pingback ^(-1)
15. Prefetch ^(-2)
16. CGI ^(-7)
17. Sass ^(-5)
20. Trace Context ^(-1)
22. Text ^(-5)
23. OpenID ^(-1)
25. RDF ^(-8)

✨ Top Web Standards

Below is a more detailed list of the top 25 of the 42 standards used on sites from South Africa, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	HTML Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A markup language used to create web pages and is the de facto standard for documents displayed in web browsers.	95%
2	CSS Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A stylesheet language used to control the presentation of HTML and XML documents, defining layout, colors, typography, and responsive behavior across different devices.	94.9%
3	Open Graph Menlo Park, California, United States Enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.	56.3%
4	JSON A lightweight, language-independent data exchange format derived from JavaScript and used to structure and transmit data between systems.	55.2%
5	RSD An XML format that helps client software find the services needed to read, edit, or "work with" weblogging software.	49.6%
6	DNS Prefetch Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States The rel="dns-prefetch" attribute on HTML elements.	46.5%
7	SearchAction Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A structured data type from Schema.org that describes a website's search capability.	38.1%
8	XFN An HTML microformat that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links.	30.6%
9	Preconnect Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States The rel="preconnect" attribute on HTML elements.	29.5%
10	Preload Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States The rel="preload" attribute on HTML elements.	25.2%
11	Pingback A method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents.	23%
12	Speculation Rules Mountain View, California, United States API is used to improve navigation performance by prefetching or even prerendering future navigations.	19.7%
13	XHTML Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States An XML-based markup language that extends HTML 4.	4.1%
14	YAML A data serialization language designed to be human friendly and work well with modern programming languages for common everyday tasks.	3.3%
15	Prefetch Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States The rel="prefetch" attribute on HTML elements.	1.9%
16	CGI Wilmington, Delaware, United States An interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program to process HTTP requests.	1.2%
17	Sass A stylesheet language that compiles to CSS and allows developers to use variables, nested rules, mixins, and functions.	1%
18	OAuth Fremont, California, United States An open standard authorization protocol that allows applications to obtain limited access to user accounts without sharing passwords across web, mobile, and desktop environments.	0.9%
19	OpenSearch Seattle, Washington, United States A specification that describes a website's search engine, enabling browsers, apps, and services to discover and integrate it.	0.7%
20	Trace Context Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Defines standard HTTP headers and a value format for propagating context information that enables distributed tracing.	0.6%
21	GraphQL Menlo Park, California, United States A data query and manipulation language for APIs typically used for remote client-server communications.	0.5%
22	Text Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States The plain text document format.	0.5%
23	OpenID San Ramon, California, United States A decentralized authentication protocol based on OAuth 2.0 that enables applications to verify a user's identity through an external identity provider instead of managing credentials directly.	0.5%
24	IAB TCF Brussels, Belgium An open-source industry standard developed by IAB Europe that helps companies comply with GDPR and ePrivacy requirements when processing personal data in digital advertising ecosystems.	0.5%
25	RDF Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A W3C standard model to describe and exchange graph data on the web.	0.4%

👉 See Also

🌎 Standards in other countries

Data is based on the analysis of 17,795 websites from South Africa.
Statistics were last calculated on March 21, 2026.
For details, see our methodology and disclaimer.