Clearly, the worldwide scope of the W3C—with member organizations and offices located throughout the world—demands that the Consortium have a well-defined focus if it is to succeed and help develop the Web to its full potential. Fortunately, this is indeed the case; the mission and vision of the W3C are clearly defined. Although the Consortium’s mission and vision are described in more specific detail on their Web site (and in various supporting documents), their own seven-point summary serves as a neat capstone to the organization’s central goals.

1)    Providing universal access. With the growing popularity (and functionality) of access devices such as Web-enabled cell phones and PDAs, it seems that people want access to the Web regardless of their location. As a result of this increasing push for Web access on demand, the W3C has a primary goal to not only encourage this (universal) access initiative, but also to help ensure that you have equal access to the Web and the information it contains, regardless of what access device you are using, where you are physically located, what culture you belong to, or even your physical or mental ability.

2)    Enhancing the meaning of information. This article was written specifically for "human consumption"; in other words, it was written in a language that was intended for human beings to read and understand. But what if the information contained in this article could be manipulated so that computers—free of human interaction—could understand it too, and in turn present the findings of their "reading" for quicker manipulation? This is the goal of the W3C’s push toward the "semantic Web" and the additional languages—RDF, XML, and so on—being developed to aid in this process. The idea is to make it easier to exchange and manipulate information in potentially faster and more efficient ways than just using plain text. (In the process, this will aid in the primary goal of universal access.)

3)    Developing trust and confidence in the Web. In addition to universal access and better ways to manipulate information, the Web must be an instrument in which people can trust and have confidence. This includes taking responsibility for what you publish to the Web, as well as having confidence in the information you retrieve (and potentially rely on in various critical ways). The W3C sees this trust and confidence issue as critical to the future development of the Web as an information exchange medium, and is thus involved in various initiatives (such as XML signatures and annotation mechanisms) that will help to deliver this trust. Think of this in terms of the W3C being analogous to a car manufacturer and a driver of a car as the Web developer. While the carmaker ultimately can’t determine how their product is driven, they still feel it is their responsibility (rightly so) to produce a product with strong safety devices and that people can trust. Similarly, the mission of the W3C is to help develop a product—the Web—that, because of its very design and tools with which it is manipulated (HTML, XML, and so on), "drivers" (for example, Web developers and general users) have a product they can trust.

4)    Achieving inherent interoperability. Certainly one of the major—if not the major—promises of the Web is that it seeks to deliver a universal information access mechanism. If this universal access is to be realized, then interoperability must be achieved in terms of the software and hardware that power the Web and allow access to the information it contains. The W3C is a vendor-neutral organization; as such, it seeks to promote interoperability across technologies through industry consensus and the open exchange of ideas.

5)    Nurturing a structure that supports change. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, if you are going to work with the Web in any capacity, you need to expect and indeed welcome change. A few years ago it would have been impossible to predict the changes in how the Web functions and in the functionality it is asked to support across all facets of global communication. That said, the W3C has a central goal: to develop an evolving Web that can adapt to change quickly without losing its functional base.

6)     Focusing on decentralization. The Web was created as a communication mechanism free of a central point of failure. In other words, if one location was knocked out (for example, in the case of a nuclear attack—remember, the Internet was first developed under this Cold War mentality), a message could simply be rerouted to another location where it could be passed along its delivery path. This decentralization not only adds to the functionality of the Web, but it also increases security because the entire network is not dependent on just one or two locations.

7)    Developing new multimedia. Perhaps the most exciting feature of the Web in terms of delivering on the promises of universal access and interoperability is the continuing development of multimedia tools for information access. The W3C actively supports the development of what they call the "Cooler Web" to help support these multimedia tools and the new levels of functionality that they can bring to information access.