European host/Sophia-Antipolis site.

Everyone knows the Web. Our definition: the universe of information accessible through networked computers.

The W3C aims is to coordinate the accelerating development of the Web.
One key word: interoperability.

Today the W3C has three sites: MIT (US), INRIA (Europe), and Keio (Pacific Rim). The role of a host, like INRIA, is to provide the vendor-neutral architectural, engineering and administrative structure necessary to achieve our task.

In Sophia we find people working on HTML Style Sheets, Graphics, Fonts, Internationalization, HTTP Server, Multimedia and Electronic Payment.

The Consortium staff at large (it doesn't really make sense to look at the W3C INRIA or Sophia work only, since the teams are not geographically isolated) maintains and distributes a collection of software and documentation which are publicly available by new releases on a regular basis (see http://www.w3.org).

Within the first 24 months of activities, the Consortium has succeeded in:

• developing new standards in the areas of transport protocols (HTTP 1.1), security (PEP), payment (JEPI), content ratings (PICS), hypertext markup language and layout (HTML 3.2, CSS1), graphics format (PNG) ;
• Starting new activities in internationalization, real-time, fonts, mobile code and intellectual property rights areas ;
• Developing a set of reference software, i.e. the Jigsaw java-based server, the Amaya client, the libWWW library ;
• Organizing two international conferences (Boston in December 1995, Paris in May 1996), and over a dozen of dedicated workshops and symposia ;

The Web progresses at a speed unmatched by any other new technology. The W3 Consortium has taken the challenge to produce achievements at a rate compatible with market requirements.