World Wide Web Consortium

1. World Wide Web Consortium Recommendations for the Web By Charlie Thompson, Jeff Schroeder, and Romney Bake

2. 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?

3. History of W3C

4. 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 @ Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab @ MIT Directs W3C Author of “Weaving the Web”

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. W3C Process Document Describes: • Organizational Structure • How W3C Functions Does not describe: • Public interactivity • W3C Team internal workings

9. Process Overview • Working Draft (WD) • Last Call Working Draft • Candidate Recommendation (CR) • Proposed Recommendation (PR) • W3C Recommendation

10. 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

11. Working Draft • Published every 3 months • Attains “Last Call” status when near completion

12. Candidate Recommendation • “Final Draft” • Submitted to developers for Testing/Implementation • Special Circumstances

13. Proposed Recommendation • “Revised Final Draft” • Working Group Members cast ballots on their acceptance or revision.

14. Recommendation • Voted in • Considered stable

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

16. Working Groups • Do most of standards’ development • Document development process • Focus • Degree of membership disclosure • Consensus

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Why Should We Listen to the W3C Recommendations?

22. Adobe Systems Inc. America Online, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc. AT&T 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. Here are just a few reasons:

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. Why not the IETF? • When Tim Berners-Lee took HTML to the IETF it didn’t 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.