W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. It is a consortium of organizations who employ staff to develop standards for the World Wide Web.
The W3C is also involved in education. It develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.
W3C history
The W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science. It was supported by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the European Commission.
The W3C was formed to ensure compatibility and agreement between industry members to adopt new standards for accessibility. Before the creation of the W3C there where incompatible versions of HTML being produced by different vendors. This increased the inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all versions to comply with a consistent set of guidelines.
Originally it was intended that CERN host the European branch of the W3C. CERN however wanted to focus on particle physics and declined to host the European branch. In April 1995 INRIA became the European host of the W3C. Keio University became the Japanese branch of the W3C in 1996. They now have offices around the world including:
- Australia.
- Benelux (Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Belgium).
- China.
- Finland.
- Germany and Austria.
- Greece.
- Hungary.
- India.
- Ireland.
- Israel.
- Italy.
- Japan.
- South Korea and North Korea.
- Morocco.
- South Africa.
- Spain.
- Sweden.
- United Kingdom.
In 2003 the European host for the W3C transferred from INRIA to the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The ERCIM are an organization that represents European national computer science laboratories.
W3C tests are part of the accessibility test that I can carry out as part of the accessibility tests on your website.