What is W3C, or rather who is the W3C, what do they do and what about their recommendations?
What is W3C, or rather who is the W3C?
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international
standards organization for the World Wide Web (say 'double you' three times). It was founded and is headed by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee, the big daddy of the web.
It was created to make web standards compatible among it's
members, which include all the big players on the web and other involved parties.
This is where they agree on a set
of core principles and components for the web.
W3C is also involved with an open forum for web discussions, it
educates and it develops software as well.
Incompatible versions of HTML was developed in the early days by some of
the big vendors who was jockeying for position on the web. Remember the little notices saying 'This webpage is optimized
for Netscape' or something similar? The W3C is the sheriff who tries to ensure that this is a thing of the past in the WWW
(Wild Wild West).
Recommendations go through 5 stages from a working draft, last call working draft, candidate recommendation, proposed recommendation and finally a W3C recommendation. Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent license, allowing anyone to implement them.
A developer must follow W3C recommendations if they
want to label their product W3C compliant. So if you want to state right at the top of your HTML code that your webpage is
W3C complaint, and link to them, you must test its compliancy. Some web editors do that for you.
You will notice on
top of your SBI pages that it complies with HTML4 as shown below. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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There are even more pages hiding behind the buttons you see down here. Grab a cuppa and a bikkie and get comfortable.
