"The Web community is made up of everyone who browses or puts information on the Web, who uses the Web as their workplace, who develops new products and services on the Web, who provides Internet access, and who has ideas about how to improve the Web… The Consortium is the neutral rock on which these parties can meet to agree on common specifications. W3C gains richness from the meeting of all these forces."
-Tim Berners-Lee, Director
The first browser and server for the World Wide Web was created and resided on a NeXT machine at Cern, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee had successfully turned his dream into a reality. The new question on his mind was the fate of the World Wide Web. Would there be a way to monitor its progress in order to prevent commercialization and potential abuse of the Web? The solution came in the form of an offer to transfer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
Besides Nicola Pellow's line mode browser, the Web was made more acceptable through the widespread use of the X-Mosaic browser. This browser was released in 1993 by its developers from the United States National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The NCSA site that designed the browser was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc Andreessen had developed the "Mosaic" browser to be run on X-Windows. The X-Mosaic browser helped promote the Web's usage among Unix environments by providing a way to show colored images. After its success in the Unix arena, versions for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems were produced (Cailliau 18).
In May of 1994, Cern held the world's first International World Wide Web Conference. This conference and the one hosted in October of the same year in the United States by NCSA and the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2) were received with overwhelming interest. The first conference hosted 400 attendees, while the second one was host to 1,300. Interest in the Web was also exhibited by the growth in the number of servers and users on the Web. By the end of 1994, they had reached 10,000 and 10 million respectively (Cailliau 18).
Unfortunately, Cern could no longer support the growth of the Web. During this time when the usage of the Web was beginning to explode, Cern asked for approval to continue their support of the Web. Their request went to the Commission of the European Union as a part of the ESPIRIT program (Cailliau 19). The request was denied with the understanding that the funding for Cern is provided to encourage the expansion of knowledge in physics, not furthering technology. Therefore, they could not offer the support required to host an organization to monitor the growth of the Web.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was then established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in October of 1994. Tim Berners-Lee was assigned as the director, and he continues to remain in this position today. The mission statement for the consortium is, "Lead the Web to its full potential." Berners-Lee’s main purpose behind creating the consortium was to ensure that only the coded mark-up language, such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), was transferred over the Internet. Berners-Lee did not want the transmission of information over the Web be browser dependent or restricted by what plug-ins were available on the displaying machine. In other words, he did not want a server to limit the content that users could see because of the browsers that they were using. Below is a picture from a W3C Web page that depicts the goal of transmission for information on the Web. Note that the only information being transferred between the servers (located at the bottom left) and the terminals (located at the top) is the common standards that are agreed upon, such as the Universal Resource Identifiers (URI's), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the format of the data.
The consortium's existence depends on everyone agreeing on this transmission standard. They not only need to develop a markup language that all the members in the consortium agree upon, but the members must also agree on the method that the markup language will be transmitted. Then the members will be able to create products that are capable of receiving and displaying the content coded in the markup language. Robert Calliau explains this mission using the analogy of how the Audio Industry developed the compact disc. Once the members in that industry agreed on a defined specification of the compact disc, then the members built products to support the use of the compact disc. In order for all compact discs to be able to play on any compact disc player, all the members in the audio industry had to agree on a standard. The developers of products for the Web must also come to an agreement. The ability for people in any location to be able to view information displayed on the Web depends on this agreement. The standards that need to be agreed upon are categorized into four areas. Each category has a domain assigned to it that concentrates on specific areas of the Web's progress. These domains are Architecture, User Interface, Technology and Society, and the Web Accessibility Initiative.
The focus of the Architecture Domain is to preserve Berners-Lee's dream of accessing the Web in a way that appears seamless to the users, meaning that the users of the Web are neither concerned nor aware of the machine-to-machine communication that is taking place. For example, it was not Berners-Lee's original intention for the users to be able to see the Uniform Resource Locators (URL's). As stated above, the consortium would prefer that a browser did not know which server it was communicating with and vice versa. The User Interface Domain's mission involves the improvement of the display and availability of information on the Web. This domain works on standardizing the use of style sheets, font types, graphics, and languages in order for information to be accessible and accurate. The domain that is concerned with the way that the Web affects various cultures socially is the Technology and Society Domain. This domain has tackled such topics as privacy, electronic commerce, security, and digital signatures. The last area of interest is universal access to the Web. The Web Accessibility Initiative Domain has focused on researching and developing tools and guidelines for developers to incorporate in Web page designs in order for individuals with disabilities to be able access the information.
Europe regained their connection with the development of the Web when France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) established a partnership with the consortium in April of 1995. A third host institution for the consortium was added when Keio University in Japan became a partner.
The consortium consists of three hosts, the W3C team, and over 250 members. The members of the consortium are from commercial and academic environments. Through the diversity of these individuals' cultures and work environments, the consortium is able to attempt to account for a number of users' interests.
Five years after the establishment of the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee is still the director. The previous sections chronicled the transformation from Berners-Lee's dream to his occupation. For more details on the World Wide Web Consortium, its domains and their activities, refer to the consortium's Web site http://www.w3c.org
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This page was last updated: June 03, 1999