1.9. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded an organization—the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—devoted to developing nonproprietary, interoperable technologies for the World Wide Web. One of the W3C’s primary goals is to make the web universally accessible—regardless of disability, language or culture. The W3C home page (www.w3.org) provides extensive resources on Internet and web technologies.

The W3C is also a standards organization. Web technologies standardized by the W3C are called Recommendations. Current and forthcoming W3C Recommendations include the HyperText Markup Language 5 (HTML5), Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). A recommendation is not an actual software product but a document that specifies a technology’s role, syntax rules and so forth.