World Wide Web Consortium

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World Wide Web Consortium

• Recommendations for the Web
• By Charlie Thompson, Jeff Schroeder, and Romney
  Bake

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Introduction

• W3C who is it, where did it come from and what
  does it do?
• How does it develop its recommendations?
• Why do people listen to them?

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History of W3C
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Tim Burners-Lee

• Oxford University, England, 1976
• Two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd.
  (transaction systems, message relays, and bar
  code technology)
• 1989, World Wide Web
• 3Com Founders chair _at_ Laboratory for Computer
  Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab _at_ MIT
• Directs W3C
• Author of Weaving the Web

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Facts

• 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web
  Consortium (W3C) at MIT
• April 1995, INRIA became the first European W3C
  host
• Followed by Keio University of Japan, in Asia in
  1996
• 2003, ERCIM took over the role of European W3C
  Host from INRIA
• December 2004, in Boston, MA, and in June 2005,
  in France, W3C celebrated its 10th anniversary
  with symposia about the history and future of the
  Web and W3C

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Achievements Over Time

• Oct 1996 - First W3C Recommendation published is
  Portable Network Graphics
• Dec 1996 - Separating content from structure,
  CSS Level 1 is published
• Dec 1997 - HTML 4.0 adds tables, scripting, style
  sheets, internationalization, and accessibility
  features to Web publishing
• Aug 2000 - Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0
  enriches Web graphics
• May 2003 - W3C adopts royalty-free Patent Policy

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Achievements (Continued)

• March 2004 - W3C gives voice to the Web with
  VoiceXML 2.0
• Feb 2005 - Character Model brings unified
  approach to using characters on the Web
• May 2005 - Mobile Web Initiative launched to
  facilitate mobile Web access

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W3C Process Document

• Describes
• Organizational Structure
• How W3C Functions
• Does not describe
• Public interactivity
• W3C Team internal workings

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Process Overview

• Working Draft (WD)
• Last Call Working Draft
• Candidate Recommendation (CR)
• Proposed Recommendation (PR)
• W3C Recommendation

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Notes

• Receive the attention of W3C personnel, yet have
  no official standing
• Notes from a number of sources
• Working Groups in Trial Phase
• W3C Member Organizations
• W3C Staff

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Working Draft

• Published every 3 months
• Attains Last Call status when near completion

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Candidate Recommendation

• Final Draft
• Submitted to developers for Testing/Implementation
  
• Special Circumstances

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Proposed Recommendation

• Revised Final Draft
• Working Group Members cast ballots on their
  acceptance or revision.

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Recommendation

• Voted in
• Considered stable

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Structure

• Director
• Members
• Advisory Committee
• Team
• Advisory Board
• Technical Architecture Group
• Working Groups

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Working Groups

• Do most of standards development
• Document development process
• Focus
• Degree of membership disclosure
• Consensus

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CSS

• Short for Cascading Style Sheets, a feature added
  to HTML that gives both Web site developers and
  users more control over how pages are displayed.
  With CSS, designers and users can create style
  sheets that define how different elements, such
  as headers and links, appear. These Style Sheets
  can then be applied to any Web page.

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PNG

• Portable Network Graphics - A file format for
  bitmapped graphic images approved by the World
  Wide Web Consortium as a replacement for GIF
  files. GIF files use a patented data compression
  algorithm PNG is patent- and license-free.

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RDF

• A set of rules (a sort of language) for creating
  descriptions of information, especially
  information available on the World Wide Web. RDF
  could be used to describe a collection of books,
  or artists, or a collection of web pages as in
  the RSS data format which uses RDF to create
  machine-readable summaries of web sites.

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XML

• Extensible Markup Language is a W3C initiative
  that allows information and services to be
  encoded with meaningful structure and semantics
  that computers and humans can understand. XML is
  great for information exchange, and can easily be
  extended to include user-specified and
  industry-specified tags.

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Why Should We Listen to the W3C Recommendations?
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Here are just a few reasons

• Adobe Systems Inc.
• America Online, Inc.
• Apple Computer, Inc.
• ATT
• The Boeing Company
• British Broadcasting Corporation
• Canon, Inc.
• Cisco Systems
• Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology
• Google, Inc.
• HP
• Hitachi, Ltd.
• IBM Corporation

• Macromedia
• Microsoft Corporation
• Mozilla Foundation
• Nokia
• Novell, Inc.
• Opera Software
• Oracle Software
• SEMANTIC SYSTEMS, S.A.
• Sun Microsystems, Inc.
• Walt Disney Internet Group
• Yahoo!, Inc.

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But why do they listen to the W3C?

• Because a standards body is the only way to keep
  internet technologies from being fragmented.
• It is better for customers and users of the
  internet.
• Because they are members.

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But why do they want to members?

• Communication, project management, accounting,
  advertising, and security.
• Web technologies are the very heart of many
  organizations.
• Companies need that part of their organization to
  be stable, and want to have a say in how it
  evolves.

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Why not the IETF?

• When Tim Berners-Lee took HTML to the IETF it
  didnt work out.
• The IETF has traditionally been for lower
  middle-ware.
• Its method for standards is thorough but not very
  efficient.
• Practical for critical low level standards, but
  not for upper level standards.