W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium.
It is basically the main international establishment for the WWW(World Wide Web). The main motive behind the World Wide Web Consortium is to lead the web to its full potential and to ensure regular development of the web. It serves the purpose of developing various protocols in order to ensure the growth of the web. It consists of organizations that provide full time working for staff in order to ensure the development of the web. Currently, the W3C is being led by Tim Berners-Lee and has a staff of 443 members. The main headquarters of W3C is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
History
World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in October 1994 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the support of DARPA(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and CERN. The main vision of W3C was to standardize the technologies as well as the protocols that are used to build the web. It also tried to encourage the organizations to adopt the new standards defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. In the next few years, the W3C thus published various recommendations such as the format of PNG images, CSS(versions 1 and 2), etc. European branch of W3C was first considered to be hosted by CERN but later it did not happen as CERN focused on physics rather than Information Technology. So the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation hosted the European branch of W3C in April 1995. Further various other hosts were decided such as Beihang University being the Chinese host, Keio University being the Asian host, etc.
Characteristics of W3C
- It is responsible for creating and publishing web standards.
- It also ensures the growth and development of web.
- It also develops the standards for web scripting, web applications and other dynamic contents.
- It is an organization which helps in the promotion of interoperability by the promotion and designing of open protocols.
- W3C uses the principles of modularity, simplicity and extensibility while designing web protocols.
Advantages
- W3C enables the easier maintenance of the W3C validated websites.
- It provides a consistent and defined look for all the W3C validated websites.
- It standardizes the validated websites so that they are accessible to different devices.
- It enables faster browser interaction.
Disadvantages
- W3C validation is a timely process and thus the time for full validation depends on the website code.
- W3C validation exercises have costs associated with them.
- Sometimes translation issues arise in W3C validation of websites.