W3C debabbled
In this day and age of conspiracy theories and shadow governments, why should the internet miss out on the fun? This week is all about the secret society that rules over everything we do on the web, the W3C.What's the W3C?
Ok, maybe I exaggerated just a little. The W3C isn't really all that secretive, although many internet users these days have probably never heard of them. W3C is actually two bits of technobabble for the price of one. W3C itself is shorthand for WWWC, which is an abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C was founded by Tim-Berners Lee, arguably the father (or at least a well-liked uncle) of the internet, to help guide the standards and protocols required to keep the web functioning properly. The W3C defines and updates standards for things like HTML, CSS, XML, etc., making those standards available to programmers and browser developers in order to encourage general compliance to a core set of "rules" that govern content and communications on the internet.
What's in it for me?
For the most part, the world will continue to spin if you remain blissfully unaware of what the W3C does. Unless you're really at the cutting edge or standards are a key part of your business (for example, you develop browser software), you'll adopt new standards gradually along with the rest of us. That isn't to say that the W3C is unimportant: standards are what made a global internet possible in the first place, and having a governing body to help coordinate those standards and to balance out end-users, national, and corporate interests, has been a key factor in the evolution of the worldwide web.
