Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994.

[5] It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science with support from the European Commission, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had pioneered the ARPANET, the most direct predecessor to the modern Internet.

[6] It was located in Technology Square until 2004, when it moved, with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, to the Stata Center.

Incompatible versions of HTML are offered by different vendors, causing inconsistency in how web pages are displayed.

As of September 2009, it had eighteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and, as of 2016, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

[4] W3C develops technical specifications for HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, the Semantic Web stack, XML, and other technologies.

The standard is now endorsed by the W3C, indicating its readiness for deployment to the public, and encouraging more widespread support among implementors and authors.

[15] Recommendations can sometimes be implemented incorrectly, partially, or not at all, but many standards define two or more levels of conformance that developers must follow if they wish to label their product as W3C-compliant.

[15] In January 2023, after 28 years of being jointly administered by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (located in Stata Center) in the United States, the[clarification needed] [16] (in Sophia Antipolis, France), Keio University (in Japan) and Beihang University (in China), the W3C incorporated as a legal entity, becoming a public-interest not-for-profit organization.

[18] W3C is run by a management team which allocates resources and designs strategy, led by CEO Jeffrey Jaffe[19] (as of March 2010), former CTO of Novell.

[26] In 2012 and 2013, the W3C started considering adding DRM-specific Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5, which was criticised as being against the openness, interoperability, and vendor neutrality that distinguished websites built using only W3C standards from those requiring proprietary plug-ins like Flash.