The World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) creates the WWW standards.

W3C's mission is to lead the Web to its full potential, which it does by developing specifications, guidelines, software, and tools.

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The World Wide Web Consortium

From Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, director and founder of the World Wide Web consortium:

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

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

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

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

As developers, especially when creating educational Web sites, we can help turn this dream into reality. The most important W3C standards are:

HTML

XHTML

CSS

XML

XSL

DOM

You can read more about W3C in our W3C tutorial.