Vision for W3C

1. Purpose of this Document

This document articulates W3C’s mission, its values, and its organizational principles; in other words, our vision for W3C as an organization in the context of our vision for the Web itself. The goal of this vision is not to predict the future, but to define shared principles to guide our decisions.

The goals of this document are to:

• Help the world understand what W3C is, what it does, and why it matters

• Communicate shared values and principles of the W3C community

• Be opinionated enough to provide guidance and a framework for making decisions, particularly on controversial issues

• Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision, while being open to evolving based on the needs of the community

2. Introduction

The World Wide Web was originally conceived as a tool for sharing information. It has evolved rapidly into a fundamental part of humanity, sparking major social change by providing and expanding access to knowledge, education, commerce and shopping, social experiences, civic functions, entertainment, and more.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded as an organization to provide a consistent architecture across the rapid pace of progress in the Web, and to build a common community to support its development.

The Web’s amazing success has also led to many unintended and undesirable consequences that harm society: openness and anonymity have given rise to scams, phishing, and fraud; the ease of gathering personal information has led to business models that mine and sell detailed user data, without people’s awareness or consent; rapid global information sharing has allowed misinformation to flourish and be exploited for political or commercial gain. This has divided societies and incited hate. We must do better. We must take steps to address these consequences in the standards we create.

Technology is not neutral; new technologies enable new actions and new possibilities, and we must take responsibility to address the actual impact of our work. W3C’s Technical Architecture Group’s work to clearly define Ethical Web Principles is a strong basis to improve the ethical integrity of the Web.

The Web has had a tremendous impact on the world, and its impact will continue to grow in the future, as it expands reach, knowledge, education, and services even more broadly. We believe the World Wide Web should be inclusive and respectful of its users: a Web that supports facts over falsehoods, people over profits, humanity over hate.

3. W3C’s Vision for the World Wide Web

• The Web is for all humanity.

• The Web is designed for the good of its users.

• The Web must be safe for its users.

• There is one interoperable world-wide Web.

4. Vision for W3C

W3C leads the community in defining a World Wide Web that puts users first, by developing principles-based technical standards and guidelines.

The fundamental function of W3C today is to provide an open forum where diverse voices from around the world and from different organizations and industries work together to evolve the web by building consensus on voluntary global standards for Web technologies.

W3C embeds its core values and principles in the Web’s architecture. To build a better future, W3C must rise even further to the challenge of improving the Web’s fundamental integrity, while continuing to expand the Web’s scope and reach. As the Ethical Web Principles state: “The Web should empower an equitable, informed, and interconnected society.”

5. Operational Principles for W3C

In order to fulfill our Vision, we will follow these operational principles:

• User-first: We put the needs of users first: above authors, publishers, implementers, paying W3C Members, or theoretical purity.
• Multi-stakeholder: We intentionally involve stakeholders from end to end in building the Web: developers, content creators, and end users. Our work will not be dominated by any person, company, or interest group.
• Diversity: We believe in diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, disabilities, gender identities, industries, organizational sizes, and more. In order to ensure W3C serves the needs of the entire Web user base, we also strive to broaden diversity and inclusion for our own participants.
• Thorough Review: We ensure the technical standards of the Web use broad and consistent horizontal review to ensure fundamental attributes such as accessibility, internationalization, sustainability, privacy, security, technical soundness, and architectural integrity.
• Consensus: We believe in principled, community-wide consensus-building as the basis for building standards.
• Free to Implement: Our standards are rooted in a strong royalty-free patent policy and open copyright licenses.
• Open Participation: We welcome individuals and organizations of all sizes (from single-person companies to multi-nationals), and take feedback from the general public.
• Interoperability: We verify the fitness of our specifications through open test suites and actual implementation experience, because we believe the purpose of standards is to enable independent interoperable implementations.
• Incubation: The Web will continue to expand in user base, global reach, and technical breadth. We are committed to encouraging incubation in new areas, collaborating on innovations across our community.
• Avoid Centralization: We aim to reduce centralization in Web architecture, minimizing single points of failure and single points of control.
• Collaboration: We are committed to establishing and improving collaborative relationships with other Internet and Web standards organizations, and building and maintaining respected relationships with governments and businesses for providing credible advice.

6. Acknowledgements and supporting material

• This document is intended to be a stronger vision statement for W3C. This is currently exposed as a work item of the W3C Advisory Board, on the AB wiki.

• This document is the result of many people’s work, notably Chris Wilson, David Singer, Mike Champion, Tantek Çelik, Tzviya Siegman, Avneesh Singh, and the rest of the Advisory Board and Vision Task Force members.

• This document builds on the basis of the Technical Architecture Group’s excellent Ethical Web Principles. It is not intended to supplant that work nor redefine it, but fit into the same framework and promote many of the same goals.

7. Changes

7.1. Changes from 2024-04-03 Note

• Status of this document:
  • add “and reflects the consensus of the AB at the time of publication” (#186)
  • move “It will continue to evolve, and the AB will issue updates as often as needed.” to end of last paragraph to clarify intent to iterate after Statement (#174)
• 1. Purpose of this Document:
  • first sentence: clarify components of the Vision (#179)
  • last two goals: move “guidance” into second to last goal, last goal add “remain relevant without needing frequent revision, while being open”, change “evolve when needed” to “evolving based on the needs of the community”. (#181)
• 2. Introduction:
  • add abbr markup to parenthetical W3C (#191)
• 4. Vision for W3C:
  • first sentence: add “principles-based” to connect to latter Ethical Web Principles (EWP) reference, de-dupe phrase from EWP expanded later in section (#184)
  • third paragraph: Move “… core values and principles in the Web’s architecture.” to start of paragraph, punctuation, use exact quote from EWP (#178, #184)
• 5. Operational Principles for W3C:
  • Thorough Review: add “technical soundness, and architectural integrity” to end of list (#173)
• 6 Acknowledgements and supporting material:
  • add “and Vision Task Force members.” (#175)