Note: This information is out-of-date, but is kept for historical and archival reasons. Please see the newer List of W3C Activities

Activities of the W3C

September 1994

The W3 consortium is created to be a vendor-neutral enabling organization. The tasks it takes on are those which respond to needs to protect everyone's investment in W3 technology.

The field is a rapidly changing one. Whereas at one point, several problems may seem to have equal weight, further analysis, or external events may make some seem trivial and others very involved. That is a reality of the networked information field. W3O tries to be as reactive as necessary to answer the real need of the moment. The following is intended to illustrate the general style. As for the later list of issues to be addressed, it can only be taken as a guide, and will be changed as a function of need, and input from collaborators and consortium members.

Under construction.

Reference Point

Before the W3O, CERN was the only body which could be taken to define what W3 was and was not. This was not an appropriate activity for a high energy physics lab per se, and it was felt that the an international presence was also needed.

The W3O therefore answers the question "what is W3" at all levels. Although it does not have resources to answer all end user queries, it provides materials for press and educators, and reference material on the web for all internet-connected people. On the technical level, it will produce standards and technical notes to define conforming W3 applications.

Editing of Standards

The W3C is not a standards body. However, it provides effort to help focus and guide and promote standards-making activity. This implies detailed involvement with developers and researchers and awareness of trends and implications of convergent and emerging technologies. It implies, where appropriate, working in conjunction with standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force to create standards. W3 was developed, and W3C continues, on the basis of rough consensus among an open, informed, group, and working code.

Production of reference code

Reference code makes everything develop more quickly:

It helps new developers get up to speed quickly
It prevents the industry from expending effort on existing technology, allowing it to concentrate on enhancements
It gives researchers a platform on which to build experiments;
It can be used in building a conformance test suite.

The W3C starts by continuing support for the code previously supported and placed in the public domain by CERN and placed in the public domain:

The libwww code library, a basic toolbox containing protocol and parsing code for building clients and gateway servers;
The cern_httpd server, a general purpose flexible server for unix and VMS platforms;
The line mode browser, an example client application and general purpose tool usable in shell scripts, etc, for web access;

It may be necessary to distribute an example GUI browser or editor, as increasingly libwww functions cannot be demonstrated easily without a GUI application.

The W3C may also maintain (though not necessarily distribute widely) a set of prototypes which can be used for testing new ideas and proposed protocol additions. It is envisaged that these prototypes should be freely shared amongst the organizations institutes and the consortium members.

The W3C will certainly not aim to compete with the products of consortium members.

The plan is that consortium members should have more timely access to the reference code and interface specifications as they develop. There will also (as for X) be general public releases from time to time.

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