Our vision

To achieve our vision to make the web work, for everyone, we uphold the following core values:

  • The web is for all humanity.
  • The web is designed for the good of its users.
  • The web must be safe for its users.
  • There is one interoperable world-wide web.

Our identity

  • We are an open forum where diverse voices from around the world and industries come together, incubate and build consensus for global standards for web technologies.
  • We are socially responsible and committed to ensure that the web is for everyone; we greatly emphasize accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security.
  • We are committed to developing open and royalty-free standards with high focus on interoperability and collective empowerment.

Founding Director Tim Berners-Lee on W3C's achievements

Our design principles

The Web Consortium follows these essential design principles.

Web for all

The social value of the web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, strive for diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, disabilities, gender identities, and more. Learn more about:

Web of trust

The web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now meet on the web and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence. As more activity moves online, it will become even more important to support complex interactions among parties around the globe. Learn more about:

Web on everything

The number of different kinds of devices that can access the web has grown immensely. Mobile phones, smart phones, interactive television systems, voice response systems, kiosks and even certain domestic appliances can all access the web. Learn about how the web transforms many business ecosystems, how the Web Consortium meets particular industry needs, and how everyone benefits:

Business ecosystems

Our strategic goals

  • Ensure efforts on accessibility and internationalization continue to achieve the goal of a web for everyone.
  • Ensure that the evolving web platform and Web technologies improve in integrity, security and privacy. We must revisit the current web platform and explore how we can responsibly improve personal privacy for users.
  • Evolve the extensible web architecture to empower industries and individuals to address the evolving user’s needs.
  • Improve efforts on new technology incubation, making it more structured and improving consensus-building among key stake holders.
  • Achieve worldwide participation, diversity and inclusion, establishing W3C as representative of the worldwide community.
  • Further improve the environment for facilitating balance, equity and cooperation among the participants from different industries, user groups and organizational sizes.
  • Increase involvement of under-represented key stakeholders such as end users, content creators, developers etc.
  • Establish and improve collaborative relationships with other organizations in the domain of Internet and web standards.