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What Is W3C?

The birth of W3C

In 1994, five years after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The mission of W3C is "To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web." Though W3C has its detractors, most agree that the W3C today enjoys the respect and support of a wide range of key industries, organizations and individuals. In the early days however, support for W3C was very guarded or not forthcoming at all.

Let the sun shine in

In the 1990s, concerns that Berners-Lee wielded disproportionate power within W3C were accompanied by worries about the closed nature of W3C deliberations and the composition of its membership. In 1998, an important investigative report on W3C was written by veteran journalist Simson Garfinkel for the prestigious "Technology Review" (also MIT). The piece was entitled "The Web's Unelected Government" and reaction to it revealed that many shared a mistrust of W3C or simply did not know what it was up to. Technology Review editor-in-chief , John Benditt referred to W3C as the "little-known group...based right down the street...on the MIT campus". He questioned the impartiality of W3C members who "...have a financial stake in the Internet-including such giants as Microsoft and Sun", and warned that W3C would need to change its shadowy nature by "opening up its membership and letting the sun shine in."

The rapid expansion of the Web into every area of society led inevitably to the broadening of participation in W3C activities. Although W3C still encourages strong corporate participation in order to ensure that there is support for implementing the technologies it recommends into popular programs such as word-processors and browsers, a large number of smaller companies and technology experts now complete the ranks of W3C's "Working Groups". These groups adhere to a very public and rigorous standards approval process that ensures accountability and helps generate broad-based community support for W3C standards.

Guiding principles

W3C laid the foundations of today's Web with standards such as HTML (in 1997) and XML (in 1998). The figure below shows the large number of forward-looking W3C recommendations that emerged from these earlier technologies, and shows the organization's current focus on device-independent data and the promise of a "Semantic Web". Efforts to achieve the "long-term growth for the Web" that is enshrined in W3C's mission statement, are today guided by the principles of "accessibility, internationalization, device independence, mobile access and quality assurance". In the orange bar of the figure below, these priorities underpin W3C technology recommendations that include standards such as Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), listed under "Web Applications".

Illustration: The W3C Technology Stack

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The standards approval process

Since the creation of W3C, its Working Groups have generated over 90 standards, which W3C refers to as "Recommendations".  Each Recommendation emerges only after a document (or technology suggestion) passes through rigorous stages of review, reformulation and implementation, called the "Recommendation Track". This process is steered by "Working Groups".

Working Groups (WG)

Working Groups (39 in March 2006) are composed of W3C members and typically have less than 15 members who are usually experts in the field. A document begins its life on the Recommendation Track as a "Working Draft", put together by a "Working Group".

Working Drafts

W3C Working Drafts (for example, the current XHTML 2 Working Draft) are fluid works-in-progress and are published by Working Groups in order to gain input from the wider community. Before a Working Group can move a Working Draft to the next stage, it must have satisfied any technical requirements and will already have engaged the participation of and received a blessing from any other W3C Working Group with overlapping interests. When this is achieved, the Working Group issues a "Last Call" for the Working Draft. 

Last Call for Working Draft

The Last Call alerts interested parties to the Working Group's intention to move the Working Draft on to the next stage, and allows at least 3 weeks for proposals for changes to be filed. On top of the work of developing submissions for standards, each Working Group is also expected to make interested parties aware of its work, encourage their input and finally gain their support for the technology. If a Working Group has not been successful in doing this, the review period will attract objections and the document will revert to its previous Working Draft status until consensus and support have been gained. Once such support has been obtained, the next step is the "Call For Implementation"

Call For Implementation

At the Call For Implementation stage, the Working Draft is now referred to as a "Candidate Recommendation". In other words, the Working Group wants the document to be considered for acceptance as a Recommendation (or standard). The Call For Implementation phase is intended to ensure that implementation experience for the technology is sufficient. If the Candidate Recommendation is successful in getting a positive implementation review, it moves on to the next step, which is the "Call for review of a proposed recommendation".

Call For Review Of A Proposed Recommendation

At this stage, the Candidate Recommendation becomes a "Proposed Recommendation". It is the final stage before being accepted or rejected by W3C's Advisory Committee. The Call For Review lasts a minimum of 4 weeks during which time the Working Group will be seeking final endorsement for the technology from the W3C Advisory Committee. If it does not receive this endorsement, the document is sent back to the Working Group for more work. If on the other hand the Proposed Recommendation is found to be technically stable, in harmony with the interests of other W3C Working Groups, and sound from an implementation perspective, the Proposed Recommendation becomes a "Recommendation".

Recommendation

The Recommendation is the final outcome of the entire process and is equivalent to what is often referred to as a "standard". Recommendations are specifications or sets of guidelines that reflect the stages that the document passed through: they are regarded as desirable, have consensual support throughout W3C and within the broader community, and involve the use of technology that is considered to be stable. At this stage, W3C therefore feels confident enough to "recommend" that individuals and organizations implement the technology in their work. A full list of W3C Recommendations is found at http://www.w3.org/TR/ 

Older Recommendations

The existence of more recent Recommendations does not necessarily halt work on earlier versions of Recommendations.  For example, revisions continued on XHTML 1.0 even when XHTML 1.1 became the latest Recommendation. This is done to permit developers and designers to transition to new technologies at a rate that makes sense for them.

Stalled or abandoned projects

If at any stage efforts inside a Working Group stagnate, or if it becomes unnecessary to continue work on a document, the most recent state of a document is published for the record as a "Working Group Note". In the event that work recommences on a document, the Working Group Note becomes a Working Draft and the cycle begins again.

Participation in W3C

Tim Berners-Lee is now overall Director of the W3C, which is still hosted at MIT. He is part of a management team that is supported by 67 staff members (in 2006) and interns who facilitate and contribute to W3C activities.  In March 2006, W3C has 401 members including the original corporate giants Microsoft and Sun, joined by others such as Adobe, Apple and Google. The membership list is completed by smaller companies, organizations and interest groups, all of whom are committed in some way to shaping the future of the Web.

Individual participation

Understandably, W3C is not structured for individual memberships. Instead, individuals are encouraged to participate in W3C mailing lists and are sometimes invited by W3C to participate in W3C workshops, or to contribute feedback on implementations of Candidate Recommendations. Other individuals translate W3C documents. Certain individuals are asked by a Working Group, Interest Group or Coordination Group to become an "Invited Expert" in a specific field. Interest Groups help ensure interested parties are brought together to review and discuss new technologies. Coordination Groups help build consensus by facilitating awareness of and communication between different interest groups inside and outside W3C.

Fee structure

Membership of W3C is not inexpensive for smaller companies. For example a Canadian or UK non-profit organization or a company with gross revenues of under 50 million (i.e. most companies) would pay fees of around $6,350 US. Membership dues pose an even greater challenge for small companies in developing countries and in order to encourage their participation, W3C recently implemented a fee structure that is geographically sensitive.  For example, a small company in Zimbabwe would pay just over $1,100 US, or 17% of the fees paid by a UK or Canadian company of the same size. W3C has also opened offices in Morocco and India, and is considering new locations such as China and Latin America. However as the following figure shows, W3C participation outside of North America, Europe and Japan remains low.

Chart: W3C Membership distribution by country

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Some benefits of W3C membership

  • Member organizations are allowed to propose technology and other ideas that can become candidates for W3C Recommendations.
  • Members can belong to Working Groups that generate candidates for standards.
  • Since 2006, members can also create Incubator Groups that jump-start development on new, Web-related concepts. Incubator Groups (XG) are rapid, lightweight working groups that are expected to produce a report within one year. If successful, the technology will transition to W3C's more rigorous Recommendation Track in the form of a Working Draft.
  • Members can (and must) nominate one person to represent them on W3C's Advisory Committee, whose endorsement is required before a technology becomes a Recommendation.
  • Members have access to pre-release material generated by the Consortium and to member-only mailing lists
  • They can participate in Interest Groups that help ensure interested parties are brought together to review and discuss new technologies
  • They can participate in Coordination Groups that help build consensus by facilitating awareness of and communication between different interest groups inside and outside W3C.

XHTML And W3C

The "HTML Working Group" is responsible for the development HTML languages at W3C. Its members include:  HP, IBM, Microsoft, Opera, Oracle and Sun. The HTML Working Group's home page at W3C includes an Activity Statement that describes their objective as follows:

"...to evolve HTML into an XML-based markup, modularize it to make it easier to combine with other markup languages, and correct the problems known still to exist in areas such as internationalization, accessibility, device independence and forms processing."

CSS and W3C

The "Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Working Group" is responsible for the development of CSS at W3C. Its members include:  Adobe, AOL, Apple, Google, HP, IBM Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Oracle, etc. There are different levels of CSS, depending on what CSS are being used for (cell phones, television, printers, speech synthesizers, etc.) Browsers typically implement CSS level 1, 2 or 3.

Accessibility and W3C

The "Web Accessibility Initiative" (WAI) at W3C was launched in 1997. It is an extremely active area in W3C, due to huge public interest in accessibility, bolstered by accessibility legislation in effect in many developed countries. Also, efforts made by other W3C Working Groups to build a Web that ensures equal access for everyone frequently intersect with WAI priorities and objectives. To give one example, the (X)HTML and CSS working groups' focus on cleanly separating content from presentation forms part of the foundation of an accessible Web.

Of the 8 Working Groups that appear under the WAI umbrella, two are particularly prominent:

  • the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG)
  • the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AUWG)

Each group pays very close attention to the other's work. For example, the latest accessibility guidelines for Web content are being developed to be compatible with authoring tool accessibility guidelines.