Introduction to Web Standards - Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML - page 6

W3C
Founded and directed by Tim Berners-Lee (sometimes referred to as “the inventor of the Web”), the World Wide Web
Consortium is the largest international organization for developing standards for the World Wide Web. It has several
local offices throughout the world. The members of W3C are mainly universities and research groups that are keen to
participate in the development of web standards. W3C works as an open forum.
Efforts are made to ease contributions to web standards. In fall 2010, W3C released the proposal “Making W3C
the place for new standards” [12]. Openness could be the key to new, easier contributions from the web community,
including independent web developers without W3C membership. It also contributes to the maximization of
knowledge reuse [13]. Important standards such as HTML5, CSS, SVG, MathML, various APIs, RDFa, and Microdata
are summarized in a suite of technical standards called the Open Web Platform , which is open for contributions from
external organizations and the public [14]. W3C is now “an open platform for web standardization” [15].
Many problems web developers face every day have already been solved and published in earlier W3C
Recommendations, often several years ago. News feeds, for example, are not as new as one might think. One of the
first attempts for web syndication was described in 1995 [16], many years before news feeds first appeared on the Web
and became supported by major browsers, operating systems, and office suites. Surprisingly, RSS 0.9 was published as
early as 1999 [17]!
A similar trend holds for markup languages, semantic annotations, vector graphics, equations, and other
specifications.
Mathematical notations are published as GIF image files all over the Internet, although the markup language for
this purpose became a Recommendation in 1999 (with updates soon following).
Vector graphics are seldom used on the Web, although W3C started to develop the SVG standard in 1998, and
it became a Recommendation in 2001. 5 High-resolution bitmap graphics are used instead. But why? They should be
replaced by SVG whenever possible, and raster graphics should be applied for publishing photographs only. SVG
is supported by Amaya, the free web editor/browser of W3C, and popular graphic suites like Adobe Illustrator and
CorelDraw. From 2010, SVG has also been indexed by Google [18]. SVG 1.2 supports animation too. Editing SVG
is not more complicated than editing bitmaps, so why not use them? SVG files are generally smaller in size, can be
downloaded faster, and unlike bitmaps, SVG images can be resized and arbitrarily magnified without quality loss.
WHATWG
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a professional yet unofficial community
founded by individuals in 2004. The WHATWG was a response to the relatively slow standards development of the
W3C staff and their decision to abandon HTML in favor of XHTML. The WHATWG has an invitation-only committee,
which controls the editing of specifications. Anyone can contribute to the efforts of WHATWG by joining one of its
open mailing lists [19].
ERCIM
The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics assembles researchers to work in cooperation
on various fields of ICT and applied mathematics including, but not limited to, information system applications,
information storage and retrieval, information interfaces and presentation, data encryption, and database
management [20]. The scientific approach is ensured by 22 organizations from different countries across Europe.
ERCIM has played a major role in the formulation of standards such as SMIL and SVG [21].
5 In contrast, Internet Explorer supports SVG natively from 2011 only.