This month, W3C, The World Wide Web Consortium, celebrates its 20th anniversary. Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee the W3C is a huge international community that has a goal to develop open standards to ensure that the long term growth of the web is fulfilled.
Ahead of the launch in 1994, Berners-Lee stated that the idea for the consortium came about due to ,any firms who were investing into the internet, via either software creation or products, selling of information so sharing of information, either internally at organisations or for the public.
And looking on, twenty years on from the original launch, the W3C community is still growing and is currently actively building an Open Web Platform which will be used for application development. This new technology has the very real potential of enabling developers to build interactive and sophisticated experiences and aps that will be available to work on any device.
This is staying in line with the W3C’s goal of ensuring that there is a vision of one web that is available to all users, no matter who they are.
Historical timeline:
1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposed what was to later become the WWW to his management group at CERN. At the time, the proposal was no immediately accepted and Tim was sent to hone the plan further.
Oct 1990: Tim had been working on his technologies and the proposal, and had specified three fundamental technologies that to this day, still remain the very foundations of the web; HTML, URI and HTTP.
End of 1990: The first web page was served up online on the first browser, ‘WorldWideWeb’ and on the first server, ‘httpd.’
1991: People outside of the CERN network started using the web community
April 1993: CERN announced that due to the astonishing growth rate of the WWW, the technology used for the World Wide Web would be available for anyone to use, on a royalty free basis.
Oct 1994: Tim continued his work and discovered that for the WWW to reach its full potential around the world, technologies must be at the same standard across the globe and implemented in the same way also, so the World Wide Web Consortium was founded.
Judging on the technology we have seen over the past twenty years, we look forward to the future! Happy anniversary, W3C
