What is W3C and what is its role in the development of XML family of technologies?
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web), is a group of less than 100 full-time staff and about 500 members, which includes corporations, government, universities, etc. is an Internet standards body that creates recommendations such as HTML and XML. A very well-defined process is followed to take the idea and turn into a recommendation, which then requires sufficient vendor and developer support to become a successful Web technology.
W3C has divided the Web-related work into five domains (Source: W3C Web site):
* Architecture Domain: develops the underlying technologies of the Web, such as URI, DOM, XML, Web Services, etc.
* Document Formats Domain: works on formats and languages, such as HTML, CSS, MathML, SVG, etc.
* Interaction Domain: to improve user interaction with the Web, and to facilitate single Web authoring to benefit users and content providers alike; includes speech, multimedia, multimodal, etc.
* Technology and Society Domain: to develop Web infrastructure to address social, legal, and public policy concerns. Activities include Semantic Web (RDF), Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), XML Signature (xmldsig), XML Encryption, XML Key Management, etc.
* Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI): to lead the Web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities, and people not familiar with technologies, etc. This group defines guidelines for browsers, multimedia players, etc.
