The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces standards—"recommendations," as they call them—for the World Wide Web. The Consortium is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of URL (Uniform Resource Locator), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the principal technologies that form the basis of the Web.
A W3C standard goes through the stages Working Draft, Last Call, Proposed Recommendation and Candidate Recommendation. It ends as a Recommendation. A Recommendation may be updated by separately-published Errata until enough substantial edits accumulate, at which time a new edition of the Recommendation may be produced (e.g., XML is now in its Third Edition). Sometimes, a recommendation is withdrawn and sent through the process again, as RDF was. The W3C also publishes informative Notes which are not intended to be treated as standards.
The Consortium leaves it up to manufacturers to follow the Recommendations. Unlike the ISO and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program, and many of its standards do not formally define levels of conformance. Consequently, Recommendations are often implemented only partially. The Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent, allowing anyone to follow them.
The Consortium's headquarters is at present on the fifth floor of the Gates Tower in the Stata Center at MIT. The other partners managing the W3C are ERCIM and Keio University in Japan.
The creation of a standard language represents the triumph of a certain variety of linguistic prescription; its selection means that the speech of areas with features that vary from the standard so upheld are devalued or "deprecated." This means that in some countries, the selection of a standard language is a social and political issue.
Standard German is not based on a specific city or region but was developed over a process of several hundred years, in which writers tried to write in a way that was understood in the largest area.
In British English, the standard Received Pronunciation is based on the language of the upper classes in the London area, and is based on the sociolect that comes out of the British private boarding schools.
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