Appendix B. The W3C and W3C Documents

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the primary organization for official World Wide Web recommendations.

Tim Berners-Lee formed the W3C in 1994 and continues to act as its director. The consortium is now jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS), INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), and Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus). The members of the W3C, which constitute the W3C Advisory Committee, are dues-paying organizations that, along with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the European Commission, fund the organization.

The W3C has change control over various Web content standards, including HTML, XML, and PNG (Portable Network Graphics), and a variety of content built on those standards. It also controls other Web standards such as P3P (Platform for Personal Privacy Protection) and PICS (Platform or Internet Content Selection). The W3C also standardizes application program interfaces (APIs) related to its standards and produces reference code that it makes available.

The W3C technical reports are all available on the Web. Each contains links to the previous version of the technical report, unless it is the first posted version, and a link with a URL to whatever is the latest version. Each publicly released version is given a particular status (see Section B.2) and a specific URL at the W3C site. That document version is then guaranteed by the W3C to be maintained at that URL forever.

See [W3C] to learn more about the W3C.