Gatekeeper of the Web: W3C
When you think about it, isn’t that the governance of the world-wide-web amazing? Millions of people are using the Web every day without having a single issue regarding the communicational challenges among the computers that serve content on the Web.
Well, thanks to the efforts of W3C and the models they developed, we are surfing through the Web like it’s one homogeneous ecosystem.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Their aim to lead the Web to its full potential by developing standards, protocols, and guidelines to ensure the growth of the Web.
The W3C has two main design principles for the Web.
Web for All: One of W3C’s primary goals is to make the Web available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
Web on Everything: Devices that can access the Web has grown significantly. Mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, kiosks, and even certain domestic appliances (IoT) can all access the Web.
Standards
Web Standards are the collection of guidelines, protocols, and specifications to define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. W3C develops these specifications and guidelines through a process designed to maximize consensus about the content of a technical report and to earn an endorsement by W3C and the broader community.
Currently, W3C defines the standards under the following categories:
Web Design and Applications: These are the standards that tell us to use HTML, CSS, SCG, Ajax, etc. for Web Applications.
Web of Devices: Standards for the devices that use Web technology.
Web Architecture: Foundation technologies and principles which sustain the Web, including URIs and HTTP
Semantic Web: Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. Linked data are empowered by technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and SKOS.
XML Technology: XML related standards for data-transferring including XML Namespaces, XML Schema, and XSLT.
Web of Services: The Web of Services are based on technologies such as HTTP, XML, SOAP, WSDL, SPARQL, and others.
Browsers and Authoring Tools: The guidelines that describe how devices and tools should access the Web.
Brief History & Members
In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) became the first European W3C host, followed by the Keio University of Japan in Asia in 1996. In 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics) took over the role of European W3C Host from INRIA. In 2013, W3C announced Beihang University as the fourth host.
As of 18 January 2020, the W3C has 427 Members including giant tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix as well as top universities such as Standford, Oxford, and Beijing.
Conclusion
The Web is a place/an information-space where web resources are recognized using URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and is accessible via the internet. The Web’s usefulness and growth depend on its universality. Such an aim can only be possible by following the standards all across the world.
As developers, we need to acknowledge the works of W3C and follow the guidelines they brought to make the Web for everyone. As a developer, if you’re wondering how to contribute to the Web standards, you can start working with Semantic Web.
