The W3C has taken on the role of the unofficial smithy of the Web. Founded in 1994 by a number of organizations and companies around the world with a vested interest in the Web, their long-term goal is to research and foster accessible and superior web technology with responsible application. They help to banish the chaos of competing, half-baked technologies by issuing technical documents and recommendations to software vendors and end users alike.

Every recommendation that goes up on the W3C's web site must endure a long, tortuous process of proposals and revisions before it's finally ratified by the organization's Advisory Committee. A recommendation begins as a project, or activity, when somebody sends the W3C Director a formal proposal called a briefing package. If approved, the activity gets its own working group with a charter to start development work. The group quickly nails down details such as filling leadership positions, creating the meeting schedule, and setting up necessary mailing lists and web pages.

At regular intervals, the group issues reports of its progress, posted to a publicly accessible web page. Such a working draft does not necessarily represent a finished work or consensus among the members, but is rather a progress report on the project. People in the community are welcome to review it and make comments. Developers start to implement parts of the proposed technology to test it out, finding problems in the process. Software vendors press for more features. All this feedback is important to ensure work is going in the right direction and nothing important has been left out particularly when the last call working draft is out.

The draft then becomes a candidate recommendation. At this stage, the working group members are satisfied that the ideas are essentially sound and no major changes will be needed. Experts will continue to weigh in with their insights, mostly addressing details and small mistakes. The deadline for comments finally arrives and the working group goes back to work, making revisions and changes.

Satisfied that the group has something valuable to contribute to the world, the Director takes the candidate recommendation and blesses it into a proposed recommendation. It must then survive the scrutiny of the Advisory Committee and perhaps be revised a little more before it finally graduates into a recommendation.

The whole process can take years to complete, and until the final recommendation is released, you shouldn't accept anything as gospel. Everything can change overnight as the next draft is posted, and many a developer has been burned by implementing the sketchy details in a working draft, only to find that the actual recommendation is a completely different beast. If you're an end user, you should also be careful. You may believe that the feature you need is coming, only to find it was cut from the feature list at the last minute.

It's a good idea to visit the W3C's web site (http://www.w3.org) every now and then. You'll find news and information about evolving standards, links to tutorials, and pointers to software tools. It's listed, along with some other favorite resources, in Appendix B.

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