World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded an organization—called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—devoted to developing nonproprietary, interoperable technologies for the World Wide Web. One of the W3C’s primary goals is to make the web uni- versally accessible—regardless of ability, language or culture. The W3C home page (www.w3.org) provides extensive resources on Internet and web technologies.

The W3C is also a standardization organization. Web technologies standardized by the W3C are called Recommendations. W3C Recommendations include the Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HyperText Markup Language (HTML—now considered a “legacy” technology) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). A recommendation is not an actual software product, but a document that specifies a technology’s role, syntax rules and so forth.