• W3C Stands for World Wide Web Consortium
• World Wide Web Consortium was created in October 1994
• W3C was created by the person Tim Berners-Lee
• W3C was created by the Inventor of the Web only
• W3C is organized as Member Organization
• W3C is working to Standardize the Web itselt
• W3C maintains and creates WWW Standards
• W3C Standards are called as W3C Recommendations

The World Wide Web (WWW) began as a project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where Tim Berners-Lee developed a vision of World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the World Wide Web - is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) now.

W3C was created in 1994 as a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), with support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and European Commission.

W3C is working to make the Web accessible to the all users (despite differences in culture, education, ability, resources, and physical limitations)

W3C also coordinates its work with many other standard organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Wireless Application Protocols (WAP) Forum and the Unicode Consortium.

W3C is hosted by three university:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology in U.S.
• The French National Research Institute in the Europe
• Keio University in the Japan

Because the Web is so important (both in scope and in investment) that no single organization should have control over its future, W3C function as a member organization.

Some well known members are:

• IBM
• America Online
• Microsoft
• Apple
• Adobe
• Macromedia
• Sun Microsystems

The Full List of Member Organisation includes a variety of software vendors, content providers, corporate users, telecommunications companies, academic institutions, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments.

The most important work done by the W3C is the development of Web specifications (called "Recommendations") that describe communication protocol (like HTML and XML) and other building blocks of the Web.

Each W3C Recommendation is developed by the work group consisting of members and invited experts. The group obtain its input from companies and other organizations, and creates a Working Draft and finally a Proposed Recommendation. In general the Recommendation is submitted to the W3C membership and director, for a formal approval as W3C Recommendation.

The specification approvals process is described in the next chapter.