World Wide Consortium

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World Wide Consortium

Tim Bernes-Lee in 1989 created the World Wide Web, and in 1994 he and a few others established the World Wide Consortium. (a) The World Wide Consortium’s mission is “to lead the world wide web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the web (a).” This is an international organization with a variety of members making up the organization. They all have a common goal which is to make the web standardized with rules and principles, and to date they have made over eighty recommendations.(a)

The World Wide Consortium has had three long-standing goals. These are to provide universal access, a semantic web, and a web of trust. Universal access means “to make the Web accessible to all by promoting technologies that take into account the vast differences in culture, languages, education, ability, material resources, access devices, and physical limitations of users on all continents (a).” Semantic Web means to build a software setting that allows everyone to utilize the assets that are accessible on the World Wide Web. Web of trust means “to guide the Web’s development with careful consideration for the novel legal, commercial, and social issues raised by this technology (a).” In this paper I am limiting my discussion to universal access and the issues surrounding it.

To help promote the three goals the consortium has also developed three design principles for the web. These principles are interoperability, evolution, and decentralization. For the web to have interoperability, a user needs to be able to use any hardware or software they want and still be able to access what’s on the web. When someone adds something to the web they need t...

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...ortium and I knew nothing about the World Wide Consortium. It is good to know that there is a dedicated group setting guidelines and recommendation to achieve universal access to the web, making sure the web software is compatible o all users and is making the web a trusted way of doing business. I believe that this organization is helping the internet to continually grow successfully, and without this organization the internet probably would not be near as useful as it can be. People would probably just do what ever they felt like doing. I now realize how important it is to really think about a lot of issues when designing a website to make it universal accessible. Building a website is now not simply designing one, but also thinking about how everyone will be able to have access no matter what language they speak, how old they are, or if they have a disabled.

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