The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a leader in developing technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the web remains open, accessible and interoperable, has officially become a public interest non-profit organization.
After 28 years of being hosted at MIT and three international host organizations, Web Standards Advocates have become their own entity. It has been since January 1, 2023.
Many diverse minds make up and contribute to the collective community that is W3C, cultivating and setting global standards for building websites, browsers, and devices. Some of W3C’s great accomplishments include creating public standards for the technologies that underlie the web, such as HTML, CSS, and XML, which are embedded in the web of our everyday lives.
The organization has created more than 460 web standards since 1994, bringing together minds from the world of software and hardware, research centers, universities, and public administrators.
How the internet was born
The Internet was born in the 1960s, as a project of the United States Department of Defense known as ARPANET. The idea was to create a network of computers that could function autonomously, even if a part of the network was lost or failed. In the early days of the ARPANET, it was used primarily for military and academic purposes, but over time it expanded to include home and business users.
As technology improved and became more accessible, the Internet began to take its current form, and the World Wide Web (WWW) became an integral part of the online experience. The WWW was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and allows users to access a variety of online resources through a hypertext system.
What role did Tim Berners-Lee play?
Although it is common to say that Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Internet, it is not exact.
He was the main developer of the World Wide Web (WWW) system, the hypertext technology that allowed the creation of web pages and access to them through a web browser, a development that made possible the creation of a global information network. and communication that we know today as the Internet.
His contribution to the development of the World Wide Web was crucial to the popularization and expansion of the Internet, but the Internet, as a concept, had existed before.
