I always struggle to use the IETF and W3C web sites to find Web standards that I am looking for. Google and Bing work ok for finding stuff if you can hit the right keywords, however if the terms you are searching has other more popular usages, then you have to wade through irrelevant results.
Google have a service where you can create a custom search engine where you can curate what sites are included in the result. It also has a nice feature where you can categorize sites.
I have created one of these search engines and added what I believe are important resources when building web applications. Give it a try here http://bit.ly/standards-search
I have tried to categorize sites into “Standards”, “Drafts”, “Mailing Lists” and “IRC”. It is quite amazing how many of the web’s design decisions are made in mailing lists and IRC channels. They can be a hugely valuable resource for finding out why something is the way it is.
The list below shows the sites that I currently have included. If there are other sites that you believe should be included then send me a link via twitter. (@@darrel_miller)
Standards
*.spec.whatwg.org/*
http://www.ietf.org/rfc*
http://www.iana.org/assignments/*
http://microformats.org/wiki/*
http://www.w3.org/TR/*
Drafts
http://tools.ietf.org/html/*
www.ietf.org/id/*
*.spec.whatwg.org/*
Mailing Lists
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/*
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/*
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/collectionjson
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hypermedia-web
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hal-discuss
http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/rest-discuss/conversations/messages
IRC Logs
http://www.w3.org/*-irc
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/
http://rest.hackyhack.net/