Abstract

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization responsible for the specification of (X)HTML, XML, CSS, RDF, and many other technologies. The talk will give an overview of W3C to help participants to understand what W3C does and how they can get involved and benefit.

W3C is a membership organization with about 500 Members, many companies but also other kinds of institutions. Membership benefits include participation in specification development and decisions and access to all member-only information. The W3C is lead by its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW and creator of HTML, HTTP, and URIs. Tim is assisted by a Team of about 60 people, technical experts as well as communication, administration, and system specialists. Specifications are developed in working groups, followed by W3C-internal and public review, implementation experience, and formal approval by the membership.

The goal of W3C is leading the Web to its full potential. This of course starts with technical leadership in finding consensus on technologies. But it also includes a commitment to universality, with respect to people's language, culture, abilities, and preferences. To further improve the quality of specifications and implementations, a Quality Assurance Activity has recently been launched.

W3C is a truely worldwide organization. The Team is based at three Hosts: MIT/LCS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science) in the USA, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatiqe) in France, and Keio University in Japan. Ten Offices in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia support outreach efforts. W3C specifications are being translated by voluneers into many languages.