So who gets to decide all these rules about what an HTML tag does or what a CSS rule should make an item look like?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards, protocols and guidelines to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
W3C’s standards define key parts of what makes the World Wide Web work.
To learn more about W3C or to read the very in-depth specifications, visit https://www.w3.org/
Why do we need an organisation to set open standards?
The W3C is vendor neutral. What this means is that it does not answer to any specific companies or technologies such as operating systems or browsers.
This is to enable web pages to be available to people using any platform.
Imagine if web pages were like old USB cables. Where you might need a different browser to access different web sites based on which company provided them.
The W3C is responsible for writing the standards for a range of internet technologies. These include both technologies that you will encounter in this course like CSS and HTML, and others such as XML and DOM.
While companies might be involved in the discussion phase of standards writing, the full standards document is published allowing any companies to develop products to use the technology.
If developers follow the standards when writing their code then it is more likely to be displayed properly in any browser.
