Table of contents: Web for Everyone | Web on Everything | Knowledge Base | Trust and Confidence |
In pursuit of its mission, W3C has these long-term goals for creating one World Wide Web.
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, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
W3C continues to expand its real investment in initiatives that directly support the expansion of Web technologies and their benefits into the developing world. Work in areas like Web accessibility, internationalization, device independence, and mobile Web are particularly important as we work toward a Web for Everyone.
In addition, through W3C Offices and other efforts to broaden participation, W3C pledges to make the Web available to more people around the world. The document Worldwide Participation in the World Wide Web Consortium summarizes efforts to increase global participation in W3C work and ensure that W3C results provide benefit to an even larger community.
Valid XHTML displayed on a mobile telephone
The number of different kinds of devices that can access the Web has grown immensely. Mobile phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, interactive television systems, voice response systems, kiosks and even certain domestic appliances can all access the Web. The goal of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative, launched in 2005, is to make Web access from any kind of device as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from a desktop.
The Web is not merely an immense book where people can search, browse, and view information. It is also a vast database that, if designed carefully, can allow computers to do more useful work. By developing a Web that holds information for both human and machine processing, W3C aims to enable people to solve problems that would otherwise be too tedious or complex to solve.
Ultimately, for the Web to be a useful medium for social transactions, people must be able to trust other parties who have earned their trust. While technology cannot guarantee trust, it should enable secure transactions with trusted parties, be they people, organizations, or services. One of the long-term goals of W3C is thus to promote technologies that enable a more collaborative environment, a Web where accountability, security, confidence, and confidentiality are all possible, and where people participate according to their individual privacy requirements and preferences.
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Photo credit: Steven Pemberton