The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - created in October 1994 by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee - is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
W3C's primary activity is to developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. W3C's standards define key parts of what makes the World Wide Web work.
The most important work done by the W3C is the development of a variety of Web specifications (called "Recommendations") that describe various protocols (like HTML, XML, CSS) and other building blocks of the Web.
Vendor-neutral standards and architectures, accessibility, usability, platform and browser independence aim at maximizing user interaction and information flow. To facilitate this W3C offers various browsers, authoring tools and validators.
