Domination by large organizations

The W3C has been criticized as being dominated by larger organizations and thus writing standards that represent their interests. For example, a member of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG)^[13] complained that:

The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.^[14]

A similar criticism, responding to large software company complaints about the slow pace of W3C's formulation of XML/web services standards, appeared in Cnet's news.com in 2002:

"I'm not convinced that developers are too bothered," said Edd Dumbill, editor of XML.com, who has worked as a software developer on Web services. "I think developers are being poorly served by the fact that the big companies have dominated the work of the W3C over the last year. The W3C does more or less what its members tell it to. So I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for the complaints of large companies."^[15]

Membership

The domain w3.org attracted at least 11 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.^[8]

The Consortium is governed by its membership, which in August 2009 comprised 322 organizations. The list of members is available to the public.^[1] Members include businesses, nonprofit organizations, universities, governmental entities, and individuals.^[9]

Membership requirements are transparent except for one requirement. An application for membership must be reviewed and approved by W3C. Many guidelines and requirements are stated in detail, but there is no final guideline about the process or standards by which membership might be finally approved or denied.^[10]

The cost of membership is given on a sliding scale, depending on the character of the organization applying and the country in which it is located.^[11] Countries are categorized by the World Bank's most recent grouping by GNI ("Gross National Income") per capita.^[12]

Administration

The Consortium is jointly administered by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL, located in Stata Center^[5]) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) (in Sophia Antipolis, France), and Keio University (in Japan). The W3C also has World Offices in sixteen regions around the world. The W3C Offices work with their regional Web communities to promote W3C technologies in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities.

W3C has a relatively small staff team, around 50-60 worldwide recently (as of 2010).^[6] The CEO of W3C as of Dec. 2010 is Jeffrey Jaffe,^[7] former CTO of Novell. The majority of standardization work is done by external experts in W3C's various working groups.

Recommendations and Certifications

In accord with the W3C Process Document, a Recommendation progresses through five maturity levels:^[4]

1. Working Draft
2. Last Call Working Draft
3. Call for implementation
4. Call for Review of a Proposed Recommendation
5. W3C Recommendation (REC)

A Recommendation may be updated by separately published Errata until enough substantial edits accumulate, at which time a new edition of the Recommendation may be produced (e.g., XML is now in its fifth edition). W3C also publishes various kinds of informative Notes which are not intended to be treated as standards.

W3C leaves it up to manufacturers to follow the Recommendations. Many of its standards define levels of conformance, which the developers must follow if they wish to label their product W3C-compliant. Like any standards of other organizations, W3C recommendations are sometimes implemented partially. The Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent license, allowing anyone to implement them.

Unlike the ISOC and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program. A certification program is a process which has benefits and drawbacks; the W3C has decided, for now, that it is not suitable to start such a program owing to the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community than benefits.

History

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October, 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the European Commission and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet.

W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.

It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C; however, CERN wished to focus on particle physics, not information technology. In April 1995 the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) became the European host of W3C, with Keio University becoming the Japanese branch in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world; as of September 2009, it has eighteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium), Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and Ireland.^[3]

In January 2003, the European host was transferred from INRIA to the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), an organization that represents European national computer science laboratories.

World Wide Web Consortium

"WWWC" redirects here. For the radio station, see WWWC (AM).

World Wide Web Consortium
Abbreviation	W3C
Motto	Leading the Web to Its Full Potential...
Formation	October 1994
Type	Standards organization
Purpose/focus	Developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
Location	MIT/CSAIL in USA, ERCIM in France, Keio University in Japan and many other offices around the world
Region served	Worldwide
Membership	317 member organizations[1]
Director	Tim Berners-Lee
Staff	62
Website	w3.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3).

Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee,^[2] the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 10 July 2011, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has 317 members.^[1]

W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

Governance models

Several models of website governance exist; various authors have focused on the content lifecycle^[13]; primary components, such as people, process, and standards^[14]; attributes, such as accountability, accessibility, participation across business areas, and standards^[15]; and type of governance structure (centralized, decentralized, or federated).^[16]

Through the Federal Web Managers Council, Federal agencies in the U.S. government collaborate to share common challenges, ideas, and best practices and improve the online delivery of U.S. government information and services.^[17] Harrison, the first co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council, has proposed the 5 “R’s" of web governance: Roles, Responsibilities, Relationships, Rules, and Review.^[18]

In a 2008 report,^[19] the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit reviewed the management of websites in United Nations system organizations and made eight recommendations to improve a website presence. These included website governance, strategy, and policies and guidelines; content management systems; and staffing, training, and funding.^[20]

Website management team

A Website Management Team (WMT) can be defined as an authorizing body of a website responsible for setting and achieving high-level goals for a site. This body includes content owner stakeholders and site production staff.^[10] In some organizations, a Chief Web Officer leads the WMT.

Website management team: An example of a tactical steering team organized primarily by production roles.

Responsibilities and authorities of website staff may be grouped by strategic, tactical and operational roles, and may be organized as a cross-functional web team. A strategic site sponsor articulates the high-level vision of the site, and determines if the vision is adequately fulfilled; a tactical-level staff translates the vision into detail by prioritizing projects, specifying site design and negotiating placement of content.^[11] The tactical staff may be a group serving on a website governance board or steering team representing the main constituencies as defined by the organization's overall business plan.^[12]

Areas of responsibility

Governance of a website may include a wide variety of responsibilities, including online strategy, budgeting, systems & software administration, hosting, online marketing & communications, e-commerce, customer service, business development, online community & social media, web content development & workflows, content strategy, translation, website graphic design, user experience (analysis/design), information/data architecture, website analytics, security, archiving, outsourcing, accessibility, legal issues (for example, copyright, DRM, trademark, and privacy), information ethics, and training, among others. These areas may be the responsibility of several or single staff within an organization, depending on available resources and infrastructure, organizational needs and objectives, website size, and how content is managed and delivered.^[8] McGovern^[9] argues that there is a limit to the number of web pages that can be professionally managed by one person, although he does not set the outer limit, either in number of pages (in a centralized model of website governance) or in number of publishers (in a decentralized model of website governance).

Website governance

Website governance may be defined as an organization's structure of staff (each with well-defined roles, responsibilities, and authorities); technical systems; and the policies, procedures, and relationships such staff have in place to maintain and manage a website.^[1][2][3][4] Website governance applies to both Internet and Intranet sites.^[5][6][7].

Webmaster

A webmaster (from web and master^[1]), also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites. The duties of the webmaster may include ensuring that the web servers, hardware and software are operating accurately, designing the website, generating and revising web pages, replying to user comments, and examining traffic through the site. Webmasters "must also be well-versed in Web transaction software, payment-processing software, and security software." ^[2]

Webmasters may be generalists with HTML expertise who manage most or all aspects of Web operations. Depending on the nature of the websites they manage, webmasters typically know scripting languages such as Javascript, PHP and Perl. They may also be required to know how to configure web servers such as Apache or IIS and serve as the server administrator. In addition, webmasters may also act as website designers on smaller-scale sites.^[3]

An alternative definition of webmaster is a businessperson who uses online media to sell products and/or services. This broader definition of webmaster covers not just the technical aspects of overseeing website construction and maintenance, but also management of content, advertising, marketing, and order fulfillment for the website.^[4]

Core responsibilities of the webmaster may include the regulation and management of access rights of different users of a website, the appearance and setting up website navigation. Content placement can be part of a webmaster's responsibilities, while content creation may not be.

Some webmasters of larger sites may also deal with heavy volumes of email, which are often questions related to the content on the website or general computer-related inquiries.

Reusability

Not all potential users of web templates have the willingness and ability to hire developers to design a system for their needs. Additionally, some may wish to use the web but have limited or no technical proficiency. For these reasons, a number of developers and vendors have released web templates specifically for reuse by non-technical people. Although web template reusability is also important for even highly-skilled and technically experienced developers, it is especially critical to those who rely on simplicity and "ready-made" web solutions.

Such "ready-made" web templates are sometimes free, and easily made by an individual domestically. However, specialized web templates are sometimes sold online. Although there are numerous commercial sites that offer web templates for a licensing fee, there are also free and "open-source" sources as well.

Flexible presentation

One major rationale behind "effective separation" is the need for maximum flexibility in the code and resources dedicated to the presentation logic.^[2] Client demands, changing customer preferences and desire to present a "fresh face" for pre-existing content often result in the need to dramatically modify the public appearance of web content while disrupting the underlying infrastructure as little as possible.

The distinction between "presentation" (front end) and "business logic" (infrastructure) is usually an important one, because:

• the presentation source code language may differ from other code assets;
• the production process for the application may require the work to be done at separate times and locations;
• different workers have different skill sets, and presentation skills do not always coincide with skills for coding business logic;
• code assets are easier to maintain and more readable when disparate components are kept separate and loosely coupled;^[2

Effective separation

A common goal among experienced web developers is to develop and deploy applications that are flexible and easily maintainable. An important consideration in reaching this goal is the separation of business logic from presentation logic.^[1] Developers use web template systems (with varying degrees of success) to maintain this separation.^[1]

One difficulty in evaluating this separation is the lack of well-defined formalisms to measure when and how well it is actually met.^[1] There are, however, fairly standard heuristics that have been borrowed from the domain of software engineering. These include 'inheritance' (based on principles of object-oriented programming); and the 'Templating and Generative programming', (consistent with the principles of MVC separation).^[2] The precise difference between the various guidelines is subject to some debate, and some aspects of the different guidelines share a degree of similarity.^[3]