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World Wide Web Consortium, popularly known as W3C is an international organization which formulates policies and lays down the standards for World Wide Web (WWW or W3). W3C is in fact a consortium where all its members work together towards the development of WWW standards.

Why W3C was formed?

W3C was formed by Tim Berners-Lee in October 1994. It was created to develop universal standards for developing HTML documents. Before the evolution of the consortium, every vendor was providing a different version of HTML documents. This lead to web page incompatibilities and the purpose of Internet (that everybody should be connected) was getting into somber. Thus, there was an immediate need to standardize the process of web site creation. Now a days W3C develops interoperable technologies, specifications, guidelines, software and tools with an aim to enhance and utilize the web in a best manner.

W3C Members:

W3C is an international organization having a large number of members who are dedicated to manage and design the specifications for web. These efforts are made in order to ensure that people form different backgrounds and cultures can access the utilize the web easily. W3C is hosted by three universities:

1) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.
2) The French National Research Institute, Europe
3) Keio University, Japan

There is no individual or a single organization or a group of organizations which own W3C. Every member of the consortium holds equally important position. Some of the well known members of this consortium are IBM, Microsoft, America On Line (AOL), Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Sun Microsystems and much more which includes a large number of software vendors, content providers, telecommunications companies, corporate users, networking companies, international carriers like AT&T, academic institutions, research laboratories, government bodies, electronics and hardware companies etc. In total, there are 425 members of W3C till date (June 2008).

Goals of World Wide Web Consortium or W3C:

As mentioned above, the W3C is continuously engaged in the development of standards for the web. These standards are developed keeping in mind certain long term objectives. Following are the goals which form the basis of the standards developed by W3C:

1) Web for Everyone: W3C believes in non-discrimination and aims at giving equal opportunities to all the human beings irrespective of their caste, sex, religion, and their social and ethnic values. Thus, this consortium lays down some standards which make the web pages easily accessible to all the people.
2) Web on Everything: With the growth of telecom sector and communications technology now apart from the PC, there are a large number of devices which can support internet surfing. W3C develops standards and protocols to support the internet on these kinds of devices such as PDAs, Smart phones, Tablets etc.
3) Knowledge Base: W3C aims at enhancing the web content and its processing via databases and scripts so that people can use the internet as a useful knowledge source.
4) Trust and Confidence: W3C also lays down the standards for internet security and privacy so that people can confidently involve into activities like e-commerce.

Apart from creating the new ones, W3C also updates its existing standards whenever required and it is recommended that the web developers conform to these standards while creating HTML documents.