World Wide Web Consortium
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The World Wide Web Consortium logo |
The
World Wide Web Consortium (
W3C) is an international
consortium where
member organizations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop standards for the
World Wide Web. W3C's stated mission is "To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web."[
1] W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software, and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web. The Consortium is headed by
Tim Berners-Lee, the primary author of the
URL (Uniform Resource Locator),
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
specifications, the principal technologies that form the basis of the World Wide Web.
In October 1994,
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, moved from the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where the World Wide Web originated in 1989, and founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the
Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the
European Commission.
The consortium was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.
It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C. However, CERN wished to focus on particle physics, not information technology. In April 1995 the
Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (
INRIA) became the European host of W3C, joined by
Keio University of Japan in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world; as of May 2006 it has sixteen World Offices covering
Australia, the Benelux countries (
the Netherlands,
Luxemburg, and
Belgium), Mainland
China,
Finland,
Germany and
Austria,
Greece,
Hong Kong,
Hungary,
India,
Ireland,
Israel,
Italy,
Korea,
Morocco,
Spain,
Sweden, and the
United Kingdom.
In January 2003, the European host was transferred from INRIA to the
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (
ERCIM), an organization that represents European national computer science laboratories.
In accord with the W3C Process Document, a Recommendation progresses through the maturity levels of
Working Draft (WD),
Last Call Working Draft,
Candidate Recommendation (CR), and
Proposed Recommendation (PR), culminating ultimately as a
W3C Recommendation (REC). A Recommendation may be updated by separately-published
Errata until enough substantial edits accumulate, at which time a new
edition of the Recommendation may be produced (e.g.,
XML is now in its third edition). W3C also publishes various kinds of informative
Notes which are not intended to be treated as standards.
The Consortium leaves it up to manufacturers to follow the Recommendations. Many of its standards define levels of conformance, which the developers must follow if they wish to label their product W3C-compliant. Like any standards of other organizations, W3C recommendations are sometimes implemented partially. The Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent license, allowing anyone to implement them.
Unlike the
ISOC and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program. A certification program is a process which has benefits and drawbacks; the W3C has decided, for now, that it is not suitable to start such a program without the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community than benefits.
The Consortium is jointly administered by the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the USA, the
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) (in
Sophia Antipolis,
France), and
Keio University (in
Japan). The W3C also has World Offices in fifteen regions around the world. The W3C Offices work with their regional Web communities to promote W3C technologies in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities.
{|border=0|width=90%W3C/
IETF Standards (over
Internet protocol suite):
*
CSS*
CGI*
DOM*
RDF*
SVG*
SOAP*
SMIL*
WSDL*
XHTML*
XML*
XML Information Set*
XPath*
XQuery*
XSLTOther related topics:
*
Device Independence*
Mobile Web*
Request for Comments*
WAI*
Web page*
Web server*
Web services*
Web template*
XMLHttpRequest
