The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web. It was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. As of 2025, the consortium has more than 350 member organisations worldwide, including businesses, government bodies and other institutions.
According to the W3C website, the organisation’s mission is ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web’. By following W3C guidelines, software developers can help ensure that their websites and applications work correctly with different web technologies and browsers. Examples of W3C standards include HTML, XML, the Document Object Model (DOM), CSS and SVG.
