Introduction to W3C

What is W3C?

• W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium
• W3C was created in October 1994
• W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee
• W3C is a member organization
• W3C's work is to standardize the web
• W3C creates and maintains WWW standards
• W3C standards are known as W3C Recommendations (W3C Specifications)

How was W3C Created?

The World Wide Web developed as a project at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee created the initial blueprint for the web.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

W3C was created in 1994 to accomplish collaborative work between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and CERN, with support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission.

Standardizing the Web

W3C is committed to enabling all users to access the web, regardless of their cultural and educational background, abilities, financial status, or disabilities.

W3C collaborates with other standardization organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and the Unicode Consortium.

W3C is operated jointly by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) in France, and Keio University in Japan, with offices worldwide.

W3C Members

Given the significance of the web in terms of its impact and investment, it should not be controlled by any single organization. Therefore, W3C acts as a member organization:

Some notable members include:

• IBM
• Microsoft
• America Online
• Apple
• Adobe
• Macromedia
• Sun Microsystems

W3C Members encompass software developers, content providers, corporate users, communication companies, research institutions, research labs, standardization bodies, and governments.

W3C Recommendations

W3C's primary work is developing web specifications (known as Recommendations), which describe communication protocols for the web such as HTML and XHTML, among other building blocks.

Each W3C Recommendation is developed by a working group comprised of members and invited experts, funded by companies and organizations. The working group creates a working draft and eventually a proposed recommendation. Generally, for formal approval, the recommendation is submitted to W3C members and the director.

In the next section, we will explain the approval process for specifications.