World-Wide Web Consortium

World-Wide Web Consortium
The World-Wide Web (W3C) Consortium is an international collaborative organization with the goal of optimizing the Web to it’s full potential. Lead by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the organization works to continually improve Web standards. Currently, W3C is working on standardizing the latest iteration of the web, Web 3.0, often referred to as the semantic web.

The W3 consortium was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee shortly after he ended his employment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). One of the most prominent tasks W3 is responsible for is collaborating with industry leaders to standardize the Web. Issues arise when there are differences in the handling of HTML and CSS between vendors. Pages can be displayed inconsistently between browsers or in some cases fail to work at all if there are discrepancies between what the code intends to do and how the browser interprets the markup and page styles. In order to address this, the consortium works to create a standardized system for all web developers to work with, ensuring maximum compatibility over the whole of the Web.