Introduction to W3C

Introduction to W3C

What is W3C?

• W3C refers to the World Wide Web Consortium
• W3C was created in October 1994
• W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee
• W3C is a member organization
• W3C's job is to standardize the web
• W3C creates and maintains the WWW standard
• The W3C standard is known as the W3C Recommendation (W3C specification).

How was W3C created?

The World Wide Web was developed as a project for CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee developed the prototype of the World Wide Web.

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

W3C was created in 1994 to complete the collaboration between mitical technology (MIT) and the European Institute of Particle Physics (CERN), with the support of the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission.

Standardized web

W3C is committed to achieving access to the web for all users, regardless of their cultural and educational background, ability, financial resources, and physical disability.

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

W3C is operated jointly by MIT CSAIL, the French-based European Union for the Study of Information Mathematics (ERCIM) and Keio University in Japan, and has branch offices worldwide.

W3C members

Because the Web is so important, both in terms of its reach and in terms of investment, that its future should not be controlled by any single organization, W3C acts as a member organization:

Some well-known members include:

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

W3C's members include software developers, content providers, enterprise users, communications companies, research institutions, research labs, standardization groups, and governments.

W3C Recommendations

The most important work of W3C is to develop Web specifications (called recommendations, Recommendations), which describe communication protocols for the Web, such as HTML and XHTML, and other building blocks.

Each W3C recommended development is done through a working group of members and invited experts. T he Working Group is funded by companies and other organizations and will create a draft of the work, which will be concluded with a proposal recommendation. In general, recommendations are submitted to W3C members and directors for formal approval.

In the next section, we'll explain the approval process for the specification.