"W3C’s hope is to become a truly global organization with an ever-expanding and wide-reaching membership. Our goal is to further the Web’s evolution as a robust, scalable, and adaptive infrastructure; as a platform for the application of computation to knowledge; and as a human communications medium – all while preserving its universal interoperability."
Jean-François Abramatic
Jean-François Abramatic became a member of the W3C in April 1995. A year later, he was chosen to be the chairman of the consortium. In an interview published in the World Wide Web Journal, Abramatic discussed his goals for the consortium while he is chairman: "My first priority will be to make the Consortium become really world wide" (Khare 3). This goal was further emphasized when he spoke at "Internet, Web, What’s Next?", a one day seminar held at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland on June 26, 1998. He began with the question, "Will the Web deserve its first two W’s?" He explained the progress that the consortium had made in attempting to achieve this goal was evidenced by the fact that the consortium is being hosted by three institutions. The first one is the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) representing the American interest in the Web. The second one that was added is The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) representing the European interest. The newest host is Keio University, which represents Asia.
Although the consortium is expanding their efforts to increase Web usage, Abramatic reminded his audience that less than two percent of the world population is connected to the Internet. He discussed five reasons for the slow growth of Internet use. These are telecommunication infrastructure, terminal costs and availability, accessibility and ease of use, the languages the information is available in, and finally how the information is presented in order for it to be understandable by everyone, including those with disabilities. Furthermore, Abramatic also noted that the fact that the Web's universal communication medium is important in making it accessible world wide. This is already in place because the Web had been designed to be digital since its original concept. As a result, the Web can be run on any network, be displayed on any terminal, work with any protocol, and transmit any informational content.
Abramatic's second priority for the Consortium is, "to widen the membership of the Consortium to get new forms of contribution from our members" (3). He wants individuals to have a desire to join the consortium because they want to share their ideas on the development of the Web. He feels that their input is valuable due to that fact that many companies assign employees to become experts on the Web, and the consortium could greatly benefit from the problems and solutions that these experts encountered. In this discussion, Abramatic explained why he thought that these individuals would be willing to share their ideas with their competitors. Abramatic reasoned that although there may be strong competition to sell web based products, companies also realize the necessity of having a set of standards in order to create a common ground (6). He concluded the interview stating that as more members join the Consortium, he hopes that the members can be organized into such teams in that the Consortium can continue to fulfill its promises to the public (7).Below is a table that lists the Consortium's current projects. Each column lists the projects of the four domains of the Consortium.
As the above diagram depicts, the Consortium is working on a number of issues that are presently affecting the development of the web. The one project that I would like to discuss in further detail is the transition from Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first of the next two sections of this web site includes the reasons why HTML is limited and the alterations that are being made to the current HTML recommendation in order for the change to XML to be easier. The second section describes the differences between the two markup languages and the benefits that XML is expected to bring to the design of web pages.
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This page was last updated: June 03, 1999