Introduction to W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium | By Cole Creative Boston

A series of interviews with W3C staff on the purpose of the organisation.

What is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)?

As stated in the above video, the W3C is an international community consisting of member organisations, a full-time employee and the public for the purposes of developing web standards to ensure web accessibility and to ensure that the web evolves in one direction rather than being split amongst multiple directions by rival groups.​

What are Web Standards?

Without any sort of standards, the web would be developing in all sorts of different directions! Think about it as if the web was a highway with drivers going in the left and right directions, it would be crazy! 

Web standards are a set of rules that web developers should follow when developing and choosing file formats for their websites. Of course, anyone can develop anything on the web, but the rules act as a guide to ensure accessibility and compatibility for all users. By providing on the source of truth for web development, web developers, device manufacturers, network engineers and other stakeholders can agree in a unified direction for web content. 

Some web standards are included below:

• Portable Network Graphics (.png) for Images

• Hypertext Markup Language (.html) for the markup language

• Cascading Style sheet (.css) for the design of a website

• Accessibility standards - certain colours, language, buttons sizes etc

You can view all of the W3C standards at https://www.w3.org/standards/.