Exercise M2_7.3

Explore the W3C site, and specifically their mission statement,

to find out how their activities aim to shape the future of the WWW.

The WWW3 consortium is resonsable for the protocols and the evolution of the World Wide Web and is lead by the its inventer Tim Berners-Lee.
 
 

W3C's long term goals for the Web are:

Universal Access: To make the Web accessible to all by promoting technologies that take into account the vast differences in culture, languages, education, ability, material resources, and physical limitations of users on all continents;
Semantic Web : To develop a software environment that permits each user to make the best use of the resources available on the Web;
Web of Trust : To guide the Web's development with careful consideration for the novel legal, commercial, and social issues raised by this technology.

W3C's Role

As with many other information technologies, in particular those that owe their success to the rise of the Internet, the Web must evolve at a pace unrivaled in other industries. Almost no time is required to turn a bright idea into a new product or service and make it available on the Web to the entire world; for many applications, development and distribution have become virtually indistinguishable. At the same time, easy customer feedback has made it possible for designers to fine tune their products almost continually. With an audience of millions applying W3C specifications and providing feedback, W3C concentrates its efforts on three principle tasks:

Vision: W3C promotes and develops its vision of the future of the World Wide Web. Contributions from several hundred dedicated researchers and engineers working for Member organizations, from the W3C Team (led by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor), and from the entire Web community enable W3C to identify the technical requirements that must be satisfied if the Web is to be a truly universal information space.
Design: W3C designs Web technologies to realize this vision, taking into account existing technologies as well as those of the future.
Standardization: W3C contributes to efforts to standardize Web technologies by producing specifications (called "Recommendations") that describe the building blocks of the Web. W3C makes these Recommendations (and other technical reports) freely available to all.

References.