The Push for Standards

The Web’s United Nations is an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org), often abbreviated as W3C, and directed by the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Its aim is to convince the Web community of the importance of universality while attempting to satisfy its thirst for beautiful looking pages. Their work is to remove existing fences and guard against new ones.

The W3C’s membership list (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List) reads like a Who’s Who of movers and shakers on the Web and includes such longtime players as Apple (of iTunes and iPod fame, among others), Adobe (maker of important Web design tools like Photoshop), America Online (which absorbed Netscape Communications as it imploded in ...

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