Who's in Control Here?
No one authority controls the World
Wide Web. Today's Web site authoring tools allow virtually anyone who has
access to a computer and the Internet to post a Web site and contribute to the
definition of what this medium is and what it can do. But the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) does oversee the development of Web technology.
You shape the Web
According to the developer of the World
Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, "The
dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we
communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the
fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local, or
global, be it draft or highly polished."
With the development of tools that
allow us to create Web sites without having any knowledge of hypertext markup
language (HTML), this dream is being realized. If you read the
"Creating a Website" chapter, you can be one of the forces shaping
this "common information space."
World Wide Web Consortium
Keeping an eye on the standards of Web
technology is W3C, formed by Berners-Lee in 1994. An international group
of industry and university representatives, W3C promotes the Web by developing
common protocols for transmitting information over the Internet. The
consortium provides information, reference code, and prototype and sample
applications to developers and users. It is hosted by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science in the United States,
the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique in Europe,
and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.
Check out the World
Wide Web Consortium website. | 
