The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where a full-time staff, Member organizations and the public work together to develop Web Standards. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. The staff at W3C is made up of 65 people working from locations across the world.
W3C is hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the United States, at the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics in Sophia-Antipolis in France, and at the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. This team includes engineers from more than 10 different countries.
W3C create web standards and these standards define an open web platform for application development that has the potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, powered by vast data stores, that are available on any device.
Although the platform is continually evolving, industry leaders agree that HTML5 will be the cornerstone for this platform. But the full potential of the platform relies on many more technologies that W3C and their partners are creating, including CSS, SVG, WOFF, the Semantic Web stack, XML, and a variety of APIs.
W3C is also building the technology stack to support a “Web of data,” you find in databases. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network. Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build languages and write rules for handling data. Linked data are empowered by technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and SKOS.
A technical course in languages such as XML, Java, Python, Oracle ADF training and Android training will keep you current.
According to W3C, the usefulness and growth of the internet depends on its universality. People should be able to publish regardless of the software they use, the computer they work on, the language they speak and whether they are hard wired or wireless. W3C facilitates this openness via international web standards.
Privacy is currently a hot topic W3C is continuing to tackle as tracking information is becoming more and more obvious to users. Personalized internet adds are so prevalent now, users are positive there where abouts are being tracked, if they had any doubts before.
Tracking for advertising purposes is one thing, but what about our bank records, credit card charges, tax records, ect.? In November of 2011, W3C published the first draft of a new Web standard that addresses online privacy. In the new standard, they establish an official specification for the mechanism that browsers use to broadcast the “Do Not Track” (DNT) privacy preference to websites.
The draft was authored by a W3C Tracking Protection Working Group and could be ratified as an official standard by June 2012. For more on this story, go to Wired.com.
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Evelyn says
This was a great blog and your timing is impeccable, I will have to watch the speech to see what he says but I am still afraid there is a lot he isn’t going to say as far as the tracking the government is going to do with the internet, why else would they have gotten involved with this in the first place? People have been handling marketers tracking them for years.
Mary says
I understand that privacy is very important right now on the internet and we as users don’t want marketers tracking us and trying to sell us things over the internet. What scares me though is how is the government going to use it to track us? What aren’t they saying as far as what they are going to us it for? Will they take it off the grid when they see something they don’t like?
Frank says
It is reassuring for web developers to know that there is one standard for HTML and all the other API’s. This to me and other developers is crucial because it ensures that when you develop websites, you are using methods that will not become obsolete in a few months. With the W3AC standards, even when new coding is developed and becomes popular, the older code remains usable as long as it is compliant with these standards.
Katherine says
At the Mobile World Congress (MWC), Facebook said it would be joining over 30 device manufacturers, carriers, and developers in an industry-wide effort to help accelerate the improvement and standardization of mobile browsers. The consortium, known as the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, aims to make it easier for developers to understand their app’s potential reach and prioritize which browser capabilities are most important to them. I think this is great for developers.
George says
I have been using the Joomla content management system for a number of years now and In the area of security, I can tell you that this particular content management system seems to send out updates every so often, which are made up of security fixes that prevent SQL injections which cause security breaches. These updates tend to occur sometimes once every other month and sometimes every three or four months. This shows how many privacy breaches exist in cyberspace.
Mark says
I am not quite sure what to think about this yet, I don’t think the internet needs to be messed with by the government. Yet this privacy thing might a good thing as well. I think I will do some more research on it and see if I can come up with an opinion. Your blog was very Informative and I will use it to help make up my mind.
Richard says
Now that Congress has had time to process the infamous world wide internet blackout, a consensus has emerged: SOPA and PIPA are toxic for politicians, and going anywhere near them could cost them their re-election. Freedom is winning. Together, we’ve done something amazing– never have so many people stood up to defend a free and open internet. I hope the WC3 does not become interested in censoring the internet nor in catering to greedy entertainment corporations.
Susan says
Mozilla originally introduced the DNT setting in Firefox 4 earlier this year. The feature consists of a simple HTTP header flag that can be toggled through the browser’s preference dialog. The flag tells website operators and advertisers that the user wants to opt out of invasive tracking and other similar practices that have become pervasive with the rise of behavioral advertising. Of course, the mechanism just indicates a preference and doesn’t actively block tracking activity.
Wanda says
In order to improve the support of privacy in Web standards, I learned that the Privacy Interest Group (PING) will broadly investigate ongoing Web privacy issues and methods of systematically addressing privacy concerns during the standardization process. The group will consider and discuss any privacy issues that affect users of the Web. This may include, but is not limited to, issues related to: online tracking; location, health and financial data; eGovernment initiatives; and online social networking and identity.
Donald says
The video, drag-n-drop, canvas and other features promised by HTML5 have drawn much attention, but it’s not yet appropriate to build websites against the emerging standard, W3C officials have cautioned. Separately, privacy experts point to open concerns. Since the early days of HTML, the markup language has been evolving to support richer content and media. To some extent Web content has become a hodgepodge of different standards that attempt to marry text with multimedia. Now that the Web is at the brink of adopting a new standard that promises to support rich content natively without external plug-ins or applications, standards officials warn that the new version of HTML is not yet ready.