World Wide Web Consortium
Web Design & Development Guide
World Wide Web Consortium
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Wide Wide Web Consortium |
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Type |
Consortium |
| Founded |
October 1994 |
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Founder |
Tim Berners-Lee |
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Headquarters |
MIT/CSAIL in USA
ERCIM in France
Keio University in Japan
and many other offices around the world |
|
Website |
www.w3.org --
History |
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international
standards organization for the World Wide Web (W3). It is arranged as a
consortium
where
member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working
together in the development of standards for the
W3.
As of March 2007, the W3C had 441 members. It is always open for new
organizations to join.
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
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the primary author of the original 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.
History
In October 1994,
Tim Berners-Lee left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) 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 Projects Agency (DARPA) -- which had pioneered the
Internet -- 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, with Keio University becoming the Japanese branch 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,
Japan, South Korea, Korea, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the
United States.
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.
Recommendations and certifications
In accord with the W3C Process Document, a Recommendation progresses through
five maturity levels:
- Working Draft (WD)
- Last Call Working Draft
- Candidate Recommendation (CR)
- Proposed Recommendation (PR)
-
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
fourth 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 owing to the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community
than benefits.
Administration
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.
Standards
W3C/IETF Standards (over Internet protocol suite):
-
CSS
- CGI
DOM
HTML
RDF
SVG
SOAP
SMIL
SRGS
SSML
VoiceXML
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- WSDL
XACML
XHTML
XML
XML Events
XForms
XML Information Set
XML Schema
XPath
XQuery
XSLT
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See also
External links
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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