Subject areaData and infrastructure
Also known asW3CWorld Wide Web Consortium
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the international organisation that writes the web's standards, the shared rules used to build pages and that browsers follow to read them.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, founded it in 1994, and its members include companies, universities and research bodies; one of its hosts is in Europe, ERCIM (the European research consortium for informatics and mathematics).
The W3C gave us HTML and CSS (the language of pages and the language of their styling), accessibility guidelines and the semantic web standards such as RDF and SKOS, which let machines understand the meaning of data. That is why compliance with W3C standards is the first rule for a website that works on every browser and device, and it takes a deliberate investment of time and resources.
An example
A machinery manufacturer rebuilds its website following W3C standards: pages display the same way in every browser and the structured data in its catalogue is read by search engines without errors.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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