W3C

World Wide Web Consortium W3C:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a vendor-neutral, non-profit international organization . Organizations from allover the world, join W3C to participate in the creation of Web standards. W3C Members, staff and invited experts work together to design technologies to ensure that the Web will continue to thrive in the face of an growing diversity of people, hardware, and software. Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and others created W3C as an industry consortium dedicated to building consensus around Web technologies. The W3C activities are being coordinated by MIT ( Cambridge , MA , USA ), INRIA (France) and Keio University ( Japan ). There are Around 73 full time team members in Europe , Japan & US and about 400 members all over the world.

The W3C Role:

  • Pre-competitive venue
  • Work and specification coordination
  • Pre-competitive joint projects
  • Sample implementations.
  • Reference code
  • Education

  W3C has four long-term goals for the World Wide Web:

  • Web For Everyone: Access the Web to work together, whatever their hardware, software,   network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental   ability.

  • Web on Everything: W3C's goal is to make Web access from any kind of device (mobile   phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, interactive television systems, voice   response systems, etc) as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from a desktop.

  • Knowledge Base: Web is a vast database, W3C aims at developing a Web that holds   information for both human and machine processing.

  • Trust and Confidence: Web is useful medium for social transactions. W3C goal is to   promote technologies that enable a more collaborative environment, a Web where   accountability, security, confidence, and confidentiality are all possible.

W3C Process:

  • Activity/WG creation: Member review
  • WG Working Drafts (regular public version)
  • Last Call (public)
  • Candidate Recommendation: Implementation experience
  • Proposed Recommendation: Member review
  • W3C Recommendation

  W3C Activities are organized into groups:

  • Working Groups (for technical developments),
  • Interest Groups (for more general work),
  • Coordination Groups (for communication among related groups).
  These groups, made up of participants from Member organizations. Team and Invited   Experts, produce the draft standards, technical reports, open source software, and   services. Currently 23 W3C Activities containing 54 groups.

W3C Domains:

       W3C Activities are grouped by "domain". There are four domains Architecture, Interaction,   Technology & Society and Web Accessibility Initiative.

  • Architecture: The various activities in the architecture domain include formation of   specifications for DOM (Document Object Model), Internationalization, URI (Uniform Resource   Identifier), Web Services, XML (Extensible Markup Language) etc.

  • Interaction: The various activities in the architecture domain are to evolve standards for   Device Independence, Graphics, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), Math, Multimodal   Interaction, Style, Synchronized Multimedia, Voice Browser, XForms etc.

  • Technology & Society: The areas covered under this domain are the developments related   to Patent Policy, Privacy, Semantic Web, XML Key Management etc.

  • Web Accessibility Initiative: WAI International Program Office focuses on education and   outreach and research and development. Web accessibility guidelines are essential for Web   site development and for Web-related applications development.

Major achievements of W3C:

In its first ten years, W3C has published more than 80 web technology related recommendations. A W3C Recommendation is considered a Web standard. Some of the web standards developed by W3C include CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) separating content from structure; WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines for web content, HTML 4.0 that adds tables, scripting, style sheets, internationalization and accessibility features to web publishing; XML 1.0 that promotes interoperability and domain-specific mark up, it is emerging as lingua franca of web; SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) for next generation mobile applications; Web Services Activity to provide a standard means of inter-operating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms/ frameworks; RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Lang uage) are Semantic Web standards that provide framework asset management, enterprise integration and reuse of data; Voice XML 2.0 for content delivery in interactive voice response applications etc.

Web Internationalization Initiative

  DIT is also participating in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) activities, by becoming the   affiliate member of the World Wide Consortium. A Project "Web Internationalization Initiative"   has been initiated with the objective of adequate representation of Indic scripts/ languages in   the Web Technology Standards being evolved by W3C. W3C India Office has been setup at   CDAC-Noida.

  For more information on W3C activities please click:
  www.w3.org
  http://www.w3cindia.in/