Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. During 1991 servers appeared in other institutions in Europe. By November 1992, there were 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to over 200 known web servers. In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of Mosaic, which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes. Mosaic became Netscape - and the magic of the Web was fully unleashed.
Launch of W3C
However, Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau at CERN were concerned that fundamental Web standards should remain free to all. At the end of April 1993, they were given a declaration by CERN that the Web protocol and code could be used free of charge without any constraints. The challenge was to create a body to oversee the Web's development - one that could help those involved in developing servers and browsers agree on how the Web should operate.
The result was the World Wide Web Consortium (known universally as W3C), started in 1994 by agreement between CERN and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the enthusiastic patronage of the late Michael Dertouzos, head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.
Today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (he was given a UK knighthood in 2004) remains as Director of W3C, whose mission remains simply: "to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web".
Global membership
Members ot W3C today include vendors of technology products and services, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies and governments. They share a commitment to work and exchange ideas with more than 350 members in a vendor-neutral forum.
Since it was founded W3C has published more than 110 Web standards and guidelines, known as W3C recommendations. These include, for example, Extensible Markup Language (XML) - a simple, very flexible text originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, but increasingly playing an important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.
Central to everything is the determination to avoid market fragmentation, which could lead to Web fragmentation. A dedicated full-time staff of technical and invited experts work together at W3C offices at MIT, as well as through offices around the world, in order to ensure the Web continues to thrive, accommodating the growing diversity of people, hardware and software. As Berners-Lee comments:
"W3C is where the future of the Web is made. Our members work together to design and standardize technologies that build on the Web's universality. W3C creates the power to communicate, to exchange information and to write dynamic applications for anyone, anywhere, anytime, using any device."
Berners-Lee has been working in recent years on his vision of the next stage of the World Wide Web, the semantic Web. The vision is to define the semantics of information and services, allowing the Web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. At its core, the semantic Web has a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a range of enabling technologies. More information can be found at www.w3.org/2001/sw.
Always looking forward, in May this year W3C invited participation in its new Mobile Web for Development (MW4D) interest Group, set up to explore the potential of mobile technology to help bridge the digital divide. The Group is part of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), which aims to identify and resolve challenges and issues of accessing the Web when on the move, and is part of the Digital World Forum project www.digitalworldforum.eu.
NOTE: W3C conducts most of its work through its Web site, maintaining more than one million Web pages at www.w3.org plus more than another million pages of mailing list archives at lists.w3.org.
NOTE: People have often wondered why Tim Berners-Lee did not follow others in seeking to make a fortune out of his invention. In his book 'Weaving the Web' (Harper 1999), he reasoned that starting a company would have risked turning the Web into competing proprietary products. He goes on: "Starting a consortium represented the best way for me to see the full span of the Web community as it spread into more and more areas. My decision not to turn the Web into my commercial venture was not any great act of altruism." That may be the case, but there can be no doubt that his decision has been of immeasurable benefit to the global community.
While not a governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was the leading organization devoted to setting a path for the Web's development, settling disputes related to emerging technologies and practices, and implementing standards that companies, organizations, governments, and individuals overwhelmingly adopt. As such, the W3C carries enormous power, even if it chooses to exercise its power in a soft-spoken manner.
The W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee launched the W3C at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in collaboration with the Geneva-based Centre Europen de Recherche Nucleaire (European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN), where Berners-Lee had first developed the Web. At the time, the leading organization overseeing the development of the Internet was the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). One of Berners-Lee's ambitions was to grow an organization that would be more nimble and effective than the IETF. The IETF, however, was focused on the Internet itself, and when the Web came along in the early 1990s it was unprepared for the new medium. As a result, the IETF and the W3C jointly allocated to the IETF only smaller-scale issues involving the World Wide Web, such as the specifications for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Thus, the IETF focuses on lower-level technical problems, while the W3C handles a broader range of issues more closely guiding the Web's development.
Over 500 organizations count themselves as members of the World Wide Web Consortium and work on its various task forces. Centered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with research centers in France and Japan, the W3C explains its work more in terms of a research and development organization rather than a standards body. The W3C's work extends beyond devising standards to the development of actual technologies, from software to tools to specifications. The World Wide Web Consortium was the leading developer of a number of technical specifications, including such central developments as Extensible Markup Language (XML), which was poised to become a critical part of the e-commerce architecture.
The W3C's activities are organized into five categories: the Architecture Domain, which focuses on the technologies of the Web's basic structure; the Document Formats Domain, which is devoted to the development of technical formats and languages for the presentation of information on the Web; the Interaction Domain, which promotes the Web's capabilities for interaction with users; the Technology and Society Domain, which considers the Web's place in the context of the broader society and develops standards and technologies to address particular social and legal issues; and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which is devoted to bringing Web access to all people, regardless of particular disabilities.
A major focus of the W3C's activities through the 1990s and early 2000s was the mediation of technical disputes so as to stave off proprietary battles that could lead to the privatization of the Web or the closing off of segments of the Web behind a wall of commercial interests. The organization's goal in this area was to keep the Web a seamless whole freely accessible to all. The development of specifications at the W3C, then, aims to prevent the fragmentation of the Web. Berners-Lee, for instance, worries that without mediated guidance, companies following the commercial incentive to readjust standards to their own advantage could end up causing incompatibility between media-say, between Web televisions and Web browsers-and thereby splinter the Web.
Maintaining the decentralized nature of the Web is another primary area of the W3C's concern, and among the reasons the W3C insists it isn't a governing body. The Web, according to the W3C, is emblematic of the modern distributed system. In addition to avoiding the bottlenecks and other technical difficulties involved in centralizing the Web, the W3C opposes the principle that the Web be controlled by any central governing body, seeing in such a prospect a means whereby the Web's freedom and universality could be compromised. The W3C's role as mediator highlights its aim of keeping the Web a medium that develops by consensus rather than by fiat.
Crucially, then, the W3C is explicitly vendor and market neutral. To ensure this neutrality, the organization invites the public to comment on specifications through their development process and afterwards, and works to build consensus between competing vendors and markets. In the late 1990s, the W3C mediated some of the disputes between Netscape and Microsoft and was successful in providing a forum through which the companies could reach a common platform and avoid fragmenting the Web with competing standards.
FURTHER READING:
Anthes, Gary H. "W3C's World Wide Power." Computerworld, September 6, 1999.
"The World Wide Web Consortium." Cambridge, MA: The World Wide Web Consortium, 2001. Available from www.w3.org/.
SEE ALSO: Berners-Lee, Tim
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