About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The World Wide Web Consortium was created in October 1994 to lead the World
Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and
ensure its interoperability. W3C has around 500 Member organizations
from all over the world and has earned international recognition for its contributions to the
growth of the Web.
Below, you'll find answers to these questions:
- Background
- How W3C got started.
- Mission
- What are W3C's goals and its role in the
development of the Web? What are some of the design principles that
guide W3C's work?
- Activities
- In what Web activities is W3C involved? What challenges does it face for tomorrow?
- Organization
- How is W3C organized? What process does it follow to produce
technical reports? What do W3C Members do? Who's on the W3C Team? What is the TAG? What does the W3C Advisory Board do? How do the W3C Offices promote
W3C internationally? With what groups does W3C have liaisons? How can
the general public get involved?
In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web,
founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration
with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission. For further information on the joint
initiative and the contributions of CERN, INRIA, and MIT, please see the statement on the joint World Wide Web Initiative.
In April 1995, the INRIA (Institut National de Recherche
en Informatique et Automatique) became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in
1996. W3C continues to pursue an international audience through its Offices worldwide.
Related background and historical information:
By promoting interoperability and encouraging an open forum for discussion, W3C commits to
leading the technical evolution of the Web. In just over seven years, W3C has developed more
than forty technical specifications for the Web's infrastructure. However,
the Web is still young and there is still a lot of work to do, especially as computers,
telecommunications, and multimedia technologies converge. To meet the growing expectations of
users and the increasing power of machines, W3C is already laying the foundations for the next
generation of the Web. W3C's technologies will help make the Web a robust, scalable, and
adaptive infrastructure for a world of information. To understand how W3C pursues this mission,
it is useful to understand the Consortium's goals and driving principles.
W3C's long term goals for the Web are:
- Universal Access: To make the Web accessible to all by promoting technologies
that take into account the vast differences in culture, languages, education, ability,
material resources, and physical limitations of users on all continents;
- Semantic Web : To develop a software environment that permits each user to make
the best use of the resources available on the Web;
- Web of Trust : To guide the Web's development with careful consideration for the
novel legal, commercial, and social issues raised by this technology.
As with many other information technologies, in particular those that owe their success to
the rise of the Internet, the Web must evolve at a pace unrivaled in other industries. Almost
no time is required to turn a bright idea into a new product or service and make it available
on the Web to the entire world; for many applications, development and distribution have become
virtually indistinguishable. At the same time, easy customer feedback has made it possible for
designers to fine tune their products almost continually. With an audience of millions applying
W3C specifications and providing feedback, W3C concentrates its efforts on three principle
tasks:
- Vision: W3C promotes and develops its vision of the future of the World Wide
Web. Contributions from several hundred dedicated researchers and engineers working for Member organizations, from the W3C Team (led by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor), and from the entire Web
community enable W3C to identify the technical requirements that must be satisfied if the Web
is to be a truly universal information space.
- Design: W3C designs Web technologies to realize this vision, taking into account
existing technologies as well as those of the future.
- Standardization: W3C contributes to efforts to standardize Web technologies by
producing specifications (called "Recommendations") that describe the building blocks of the
Web. W3C makes these Recommendations (and other technical reports) freely
available to all.
The Web is an application built on top of the Internet and, as such, has inherited its
fundamental design principles.
- Interoperability: Specifications for the Web's languages and protocols must be
compatible with one another and allow (any) hardware and software used to access the Web to
work together.
- Evolution: The Web must be able to accommodate future technologies. Design
principles such as simplicity, modularity, and extensibility will increase the chances that
the Web will work with emerging technologies such as mobile Web devices and digital
television, as well as others to come.
- Decentralization: Decentralization is without a doubt the newest principle and
most difficult to apply. To allow the Web to "scale" to worldwide proportions while resisting
errors and breakdowns, the architecture(like the Internet) must limit or eliminate
dependencies on central registries.
These principles guide the work carried out within W3C Activities.
W3C does most of its work with an explicit mandate from the Membership. As described in the
Process Document (refer to section 3.1 of the 8 February
2001 version), the Members review proposals for work called
"Activity proposals". When there is consensus among the Members to pursue this work, W3C
initiates a new Activity.
W3C Activities are generally organized into groups: Working Groups (for technical developments),
Interest Groups (for more general work), and Coordination Groups (for communication among
related groups). These groups, made up of representatives from Member organizations, the Team,
and invited experts, produce the bulk of W3C's results: technical reports, open source software, and services (e.g., validation services). These groups
also ensure coordination with other standards bodies and technical communities. There are
currently over thirty W3C Working Groups.
To facilitate management, the Team organizes W3C Activities and other
work into five domains:
- Architecture Domain
- The Architecture Domain develops the underlying technologies of the Web.
- Document Formats Domain
- The Document Formats Domain works on formats and languages that will present information
to users with accuracy, beauty, and a higher level of control.
- Interaction Domain
- The Interaction Domain seeks to improve user interaction with the Web, and to facilitate
single Web authoring to benefit users and content providers alike.
- Technology and Society Domain
- The W3C Technology and Society Domain seeks to develop Web infrastructure to address
social, legal, and public policy concerns.
- Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
- W3C's commitment to lead the Web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree
of usability for people with disabilities. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), is
pursuing accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines,
tools, education and outreach, and research and development.
In addition, the Quality Assurance (QA) Activity and Patent Policy apply to all domains. For information about the Activities
of each domain, please refer to the domain's home page.
Some W3C Recommendations to date
Guided by these design principles, W3C has published more than forty Recommendations since
its inception. Each Recommendation not only builds on the previous, but is designed so that it
may be integrated with future specifications as well. W3C is transforming the architecture of
the initial Web (essentially HTML, URIs, and HTTP) into the architecture of tomorrow's Web,
built atop the solid foundation provided by XML.
W3C Recommendations include:
- (X)HTML: Several versions of HTML have stabilized the explosion in functionalities of the
Web's primary markup language. HTML 3.2 was published in January 1997, followed by HTML 4 (first published December 1997, revised April
1998, and revised again as HTML 4.01 in December 1999). XHTML 1.0, which features the semantics of HTML 4.01 using the syntax of XML,
became a Recommendation in January 2000. XHTML 1.1,
the modularized version of XHTML, was published in May 2001. The modularization of XHTML
makes it possible to develop various XHTML profiles, well adapted to particular device types
or user communities. XHTML Basic, published in
December 2000, is an example for an XHTML profile developed for Web clients such as mobile
phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes.
- CSS: Two versions of CSS offer site designers a rich palette for styling Web pages. By
allowing the separation of structure and presentation, style sheets make site management
easier and promote Web accessibility. CSS can be used to control the presentation of HTML as
well as of any XML content. CSS1 was published in December 1996, and CSS2 in May 1998.
- XML 1.0: The XML 1.0 Recommendation (published in
February 1998) was the first step towards the next generation Web, allowing each community to
design languages that suit their particular needs and integrate them harmoniously into a
general infrastructure based on XML. Since XML 1.0, a number of Recommendations have been
added to the XML infrastructure. XML Namespaces
was published in January 1999, Associating Style
Sheets with XML documents was published in June 1999. XSLT, for XML transformations, and its companion XPath, were published in November 1999: using these technologies an XML file
can be transformed into any other type of XML file, for example into XHTML or SVG, for the
purpose of presentation. XLink and
XML Base, both published in June 2001, define a general hyperlinking
vocabulary to XML. A major step forward was made with the publication of XML Schema structures and datatypes in May 2001. XML Schemas provide functionalities above and beyond
what is provided by DTDs and are essential in defining complex XML applications.
- DOM: The Document Object Model is an application programming interface for providing
access to document structure, style, events, and more. Because it does not rely on a
particular programming language, it facilitates the design of active Web pages and provides a
standard interface for other software to manipulate HTML and XML documents. DOM Level 1 was published in October 1998
followed, in November 2000, by DOM Level 2. (DOM Level 2 is a set of 5 documents; see the DOM Technical Reports page for more details and
links.)
- MathML 2.0: MathML 2.0, published in February
2001 (based on an earlier release published in July 1999), is the fundamental tool for
marking up mathematics on the Web using XML.
- PNG: Portable Network Graphics is an extensible
file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images.
Unencumbered by IPR issues, PNG has become one of the most widely used raster image formats
on the Web, implemented by all major browsers. PNG was published in 1996.
- WebCGM: WebCGM is based on CGM (Computer
Graphics Metafile), an ISO Standard for vector and composite vector/raster picture
definition. CGM has a significant following in technical illustration, electronic
documentation, the CAD industry, to name just a few application areas, which already use a
large number of documents coded in CGM. WebCGM allows the publication of these documents on
the Web without a major investment in conversions, thereby ensuring interoperability among
users. WebCGM was first published in 1999, with a second release in 2001.
- SVG 1.0: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0, was
published in September 2001. SVG is a major breakthrough in bringing vector graphics to the
Web. Based on XML, editable by any text editor and manageable by search engines, SVG provides
a rich graphics content and animation facilities, offering a strong alternative to the usage
of bitmaps images.
- SMIL 2.0: SMIL 2.0 allows authors to create
synchronized multimedia presentations on the Web. SMIL 2.0 will also play a vital role in the
new generation of internet-aware phones. It was published in August 2001 (and is based on an
earlier version, completed in June 1998).
- RDF: The Resource Description Framework
Model and Syntax specification (published in February 1999) is the first Recommendation on
which the Semantic Web will be built. RDF provides a standard vocabulary and encoding
techniques to attach metadata to any resource on the Web.
- PICS : Several PICS (Platform for Internet
Content Selection) specifications (October 1996, December 1997, May 1998) describe a
mechanism for allowing users to select and filter labeled Web content. PICS provided a first
example of using metadata on the Web.
- XML-Signature: published in February 2002, is
an important step towards the Web of trust. It defines an XML-based framework to add digital
signatures to resources on the Web.
- P3P 1.0: the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)
1.0, published in April 2002, provides a standard, simple, automated way for users to gain
more control over the use of personal information on Web sites they visit.
- Web Accessibility Guidelines: The Web Accessibility Initiative has published two
Recommendations so far to promote access to the Web for people with disabilities. The
principles of these guidelines also benefit all users and are very similar to guidelines for
mobile access. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
1.0, which explains how to author accessible Web pages and sites, was published in May
1999. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0,
which explains how to build authoring tools that produce accessible content and are
accessible to users with disabilities, was published in February 2000.
In other specifications, W3C is addressing a number of challenges for the Web of
tomorrow.
- Ensure access to the Web by many devices. The Web is becoming accessible from a
wide range of devices including cellular phones, TV, digital cameras, and in-car computers.
Interaction with resources on the Web can be achieved through a key pad, mouse, voice, stylus
or other input devices. There is a danger that that only parts of the Web will be accessible
from these devices. W3C is dedicated to ensure that the Web universe is not fragmented. W3C
has recently started two activities, namely Device
Independence and Multimodal Interaction (started in
2001 and 2002, respectively) to contribute to W3C's goal of universal access. These
activities continue and complement the work already started by the modularization of XHTML or
of SMIL, the development of the CC/PP framework
(Composite Capability/Preference Profiles), the rise of XSLT, the Web Accessibility Guidelines, etc., which all contribute to the
effort to ensure equal access to the same information space.
- Promote best practices. W3C cannot ensure the implementation of its
specifications unless the community of developers and users are convinced of their worth.
Promotion and education are critical to W3C's success. Part of this effort includes
publishing guidelines for good practices (including the Web Accessibility Guidelines already
available), offering validation services
(developed within W3C or by its partners), test suites, prototype and sample applications,
and responsiveness to public input and questions. W3C's work does not stop when a
Recommendation is published, but continues through the promotion, support, maintenance, and
improvement of its specifications.
- Coordinate with international regulatory bodies. The integration of the Web into
people's daily lives requires consistency with existing regulations and those in development
(e.g., for the protection of personal information). An ongoing dialog between legislators and
Web developers is necessary to ensure a regulatory environment that is fair, precise, and
realistic.
- Account for cultural diversity. To ensure access to the Web by people speaking
different languages, with different writing conventions, and having different cultural
backgrounds, W3C will continue its important work in the Internationalization Activity.
- Encourage research. The Web owes some of its rapid growth to advances in
research achieved over the last thirty years. Continued evolution at a comparable rate will
require new research in the areas of knowledge representation, protocol optimization, and, in
general, architecture design for large-scale distributed systems.
To meet its goals (universal access, semantic Web, Web of trust) while exercising its role
(vision, design, standardization) and applying its design principles (interoperability,
evolution, and decentralization), W3C process is organized according to three principles:
- Vendor neutrality: The W3C hosts (MIT, KEIO, INRIA) are vendor and market
neutral, as is the Team. W3C promotes neutrality by encouraging public
comment on specifications during their entire life cycle.
- Coordination: The Web has become phenomenon so important (in scope and
investment), that no single organization can or should have control over its future. W3C
coordinates its efforts with other standards bodies and consortia such as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), the WAP Forum (Wireless Application Protocols Forum), the Unicode Consortium, the Web3D Consortium, and several ISO committees.
- Consensus: Consensus is one of the most important principles by which W3C
operates. When resolving issues and making decisions, W3C strives to achieve unanimity of
opinion. Where unanimity is not possible, W3C reaches decisions by considering the ideas and
viewpoints of all participants, whether W3C Members, invited experts, or the general
public.
These organizational principles are embodied in the Member contract and the W3C Process Document, which govern W3C's operations. The Process
Document is a public document that describes the W3C
Organization, W3C Activities and Groups, how consensus governs W3C work, the W3C Recommendation Track, and the W3C Submission Process.
Through investment and active participation in W3C Activities, the
Members ensure the strength and direction of the Consortium. Members include vendors of
technology products and services, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories,
standards bodies, and governments, all of whom work to reach consensus on a direction for the
Web. These organizations are typically investing significant resources into the web, in
developing software products, in developing information products, or most commonly in its use
an enabling medium for their business or activity. There has a been a strong desire that the
stability of the Web should be maintained by a competent authority, and many prospective W3C
Members have expressed their desire to provide funding in support of that effort. W3C is thus
financed primary by its Members and, to a lesser extent, by public
funds. W3C Membership is available to all organizations.
Some benefits of W3C Membership include:
- A seat on the W3C Advisory Committee
("AC"). The AC consists of one representative from each Member organization. The Advisory
Committee representative is the official link between the Member organization and the Team.
The Advisory Committee reviews proposals for new Activities and proposed Recommendations.
- The ability to provide strategic direction to the Consortium
- Access to the Member Web site (Members only) containing
information on events, technologies, software releases, working groups, forums, mailing
lists, news and announcements.
- W3C news services, which include updates on W3C activities, announcements for meetings,
workshops and conferences; calendar of events, and team information is sent directly via
email to AC Representatives and posted on the Member Site.
- Participation in Interest Groups, Working Groups, and Workshops
- The right to use the W3C Member Logo on your Web site and to participate in press
releases through, for example, testimonials.
For more information about Membership, please consult these resources:
The W3C Team includes more than sixty researchers and engineers from
around the world who lead the technical Activities at W3C and manage the operations of the
Consortium. Most of the Team works physically at the three host institutions (MIT/LCS in the United States, INRIA in France, and Keio
University in Japan).
Led by the Chief Operating Officer (Steve Bratt) and the
Director (Tim Berners-Lee), the Team has a number of roles,
including:
- To provide direction to W3C by keeping up-to-date on new technology, market fluctuations,
and the activities of related organizations;
- To organize and manage W3C Activities so as to optimize the achievement of goals within
practical constraints (such as resources available);
- To ensure cooperation between Members while promoting innovation;
- To manage the W3C Web site: http://www.w3.org;
-
To communicate W3C results to the Members and the Press:
- To market W3C results to gain wide acceptance for them in the Web community.
- To market W3C and attract new Members -- the larger the member base, the easier it will
be to promote W3C Recommendations.
For more information about the Team, please consult these resources:
The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) was created in July 2001 to provide stewardship
of the Web architecture. The TAG will document cross-technology Web architecture principles,
and resolve architectural issues. Chaired by the W3C Director, the TAG consists of five elected
and three appointed participants. Like other W3C Working Groups, the TAG will use the W3C
Recommendation track to build consensus around its documents. The TAG will conduct its work on
a public mailing list.
For more information about the TAG and Architectural Recommendations, please consult the TAG home page.
The W3C Advisory Board was created in March 1998 to provide guidance to the Team on issues
of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board,
which is elected by the Advisory Committee, is not a board of directors and has no
decision-making authority within W3C; its role is strictly advisory. The Advisory Board also
proposes changes to the W3C Process to the Advisory
Committee.
In order to promote international involvement in Web development and in W3C, a number of
countries have established W3C Offices. These local points of contact help ensure that W3C and
its specifications are known in those countries. Each Office works with its regional Web
community to develop participation in W3C
Activities.
Please consult the Offices home page for more
information about the role of the Offices and current Office locations.
W3C is the organization where core Web technologies are developed. There are many other
organizations developing standards for the Internet or the Web in general, and in some cases,
their activities may overlap with W3C activities. To allow clear progress, it is important for
the role and domain of operation of each organization with respect to the Web and W3C be
identified and for communication between the two organizations to be efficient. The list of W3C Liaisons provides information about the nature of
coordination with other organizations, and lists contact information.
The Web community extends far beyond the technical development happening at W3C. From the
start, new Web technology has been created and has spread through grass roots efforts. There
are many ways for people interested in the Web but who are not employees of a Member organization to pursue their interest through
W3C:
- Participate in discussions on public
W3C mailing lists. The Consortium hosts discussions on a number of public email
lists. Please read the archives to see if your questions or comments have already been
addressed.
-
Contribute to W3C open source software. Early
implementation of new technology in open source makes a huge difference to the market, to
the credibility of the technology, and to the ability of people anywhere, in commercial or
academic labs or at home, to build one each step by experimenting with the next. If you
make a trial implementation of a Working Draft, you provide invaluable feedback on the
specification, and you get into the edge of the edge.
If you make a definitive contributed implementation of a standard at any stage in the
process, then you further test it, but also you create a platform which allows anyone
developing code a way of picking up the new functionality - in a standard way - very fast.
Also, by seeding the marketplace with initial implementations, you put pressure on
manufacturers to stick to the spec too, leading to a more interoperable Web.
- Translate a technical report. Contribute to the list of translations of technical reports, and find out how to
volunteer and collaborate with other translators.
- Participate in a Working Group as an invited expert. If you have a high level of
expertise in a specific field which is being addressed by a current W3C Working Group, you
may ask the Chair to invite you to participate, even if you do not work for a Member organization. This status is reserved for those
prepared to devote significant time toward the the Working Group. It is not to be taken on
primarily as a learning activity. You'll need to sign the invited expert agreement to take care of
IPR issues before you can start. Please contact the Chair or the W3C Team Contact for the
relevant Working Group for more information. Their email addresses should be on the home page
of the managing Activity.
- Attend conferences where W3C participates. The Consortium generally runs its own
"W3C Track" of sessions a the International World Wide
Web conferences. The public is invited to attend, to ask questions, to give feedback, and
to talk with the Team. To find the next one, check the International WWW Conference series home page
W3C is hosted by the Laboratory for Computer Science
at MIT, by INRIA and Keio University with support from DARPA and the European
Commission.
