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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces the software standards ("recommendations", as they call them) for the World Wide Web. The Consortium is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of URL (Uniform Resource Locator), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the principal technologies that form the basis of the Web.
The consortium was initially created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for incompatibilities between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.
A W3C standard goes through the stages Working Draft, Last Call, Candidate Recommendation and Proposed Recommendation. It ends as a Recommendation. A Recommendation may be updated by separately-published Errata until enough substantial edits accumulate, at which time a new edition of the Recommendation may be produced (e.g., XML is now in its third edition). The W3C also publishes various kinds of informative Notes which are not intended to be treated as standards.
The Consortium leaves it up to manufacturers to follow the Recommendations. Many of its standards define levels of conformance, which are required for the developers to follow. Like any standards of other organizations, W3C recommendations are sometimes implemented partially. The Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent license, allowing anyone to implement them.
Unlike the ISOC and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program. A certification program is a process which has benefits and drawbacks. The W3C has decided for now that it is not suitable to start such a program without the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community than benefits.
The Consortium is jointly administered by MIT (with offices on the fifth floor of the Gates Tower in the Stata Center), ERCIM (in Sophia Antipolis, France), and Keio University (in Japan). It also has a set of local representations in various countries, referred to as "W3C Offices".
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