It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C; however, CERN wished to focus on particle physics, not information technology. In April 1995 the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) became the European host of W3C, with Keio University becoming the Japanese branch in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world; as of October 2007 it has sixteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Belgium), China, Finland, Germany and Austria, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Korea, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

"The dream behind the Web is we communicate by sharing information and of a common information space."

To "lead the Web to its full potential",the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded in 1994, is an international consortium.

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

The W3C is the development of Web specifications (called "Recommendations") that describe communication protocols (like XML and HTML) and other building blocks of the Web.

Especially when creating educational Web sites as a developer, we can help turn this dream into reality. The most important W3C standards are follows:

• HTML
• XSL
• DOM
• XHTML
• CSS
• XML

If you want to read more about W3C go to our W3C tutorial.