The W3C and its Process

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was set up by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to preserve and enhance the public utility of the Web for everyone, to "lead the Web to its full potential". It is a consortium of industrial and institutional members (around 450 at the time of writing) who pay on a sliding scale proportional to size. It produces Recommendations which are widely recognised as de facto standards. The actual work of writing those standards is carried out by Working Groups mostly made up of representatives of members, aided by a permanent staff. At the moment there are over fifty active Working Groups, with over 700 members, working on around 100 documents at various stages of their progress towards Recommendation status. The permanent staff numbers around 60, attached to one of the three host institutions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA, USA; the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, in Sophia Antipolis, France and Keio University, in Tokyo, Japan.

The W3C manages its work according to a formal Process, with an emphasis on consensus and community review, which specifies a progression from Working Draft through Candidate Recommendation and Proposed Recommendation, before the Director (currently Tim Berners-Lee) seeks formal reviews from the membership and either approves publication as an official W3C Recommendation, or returns it to the Working Group for further work.

One of the responsibilities of the Director is to consider the architectural impact of Working Groups' output, particularly of Proposed Recommendations. As the consortium grew, and the scope of its work expanded, it became increasingly difficult for one person to bear the responsibility for articulating 'the architecture'. Working Groups needed a concrete expression of what came to be called "Web Architecture", to which they and others could refer as the basis for planning and decision making. In 2001 the membership agreed to create a Technical Architecture Group (TAG), to take on the task of identifying and documenting the architecture of the World Wide Web.