The world wide web, as we know it, really didn't begin to catch on until perhaps 1994-1995, with the first PPP dialup connections and a new graphical web browser called, Mosaic. In other words, from an American perspective, the internet, as popularly understood, was a phenomenon that exploded onto the scene and almost reached an early level of maturation during the eight years of the Clinton Administration - not that these politicians had anything to do with it, Al Gore included. Other aspects, such as Usenet, and FTP, long predated the worldwide web and graphical web browsers.

Many insist that it was CERN, in Europe, the famous research physics lab and 'particle smashers', who of necessity invented the www, in order to increase traffic over their lines (see this paper, online, on which I base much of that, below: Evolution of the W3C, and See Also) The principal said to be involved in that was, Tim Berners-Lee, now credited (cause perhaps someone always has to be) as the father of the worldwide web. Berners-Lee, and some others, put together the hypertext notion with a protocol, a standard, a code, for transmitting such information over a network. They called it - http (hypertext transfer protocol, which name I think he is still living down). But it was Marc Andreesen, for the NCSA, working out of the Univ. of Illinois, who actually produced the first graphical web browser - Mosaic - and who would later be the founder (along with Jim Clark) of the new company - Netscape (now long since submerged in the struggling AOL, and perhaps almost forgotten).

By the early 90s, these ideas were being promoted and a conference was called, on the new worldwide web, by NCSA. From that, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, was formed around Berners-Lee as its director, by maybe about 30 other people. The idea was to somehow establish an 'independent' group or consortium, against other groups which were said to be more 'market-oriented'; as if it were a bad thing for the proprietary methods that might imply in their work product. These other 'bad groups' included the international standards organization, ISO, even (deemed 'sluggish' in comparison to the 'agile' W3C, old-school as opposed to new). So W3C was formed as yet another combine. And it's clear that in doing all this, they themselves would prefer to own, or be proprietors, of whatever they might uniquely propose to the industry concerning the worldwide web; that they would go 'copyright happy', themselves, if they could lay claim to anything in particular.

CERN itself began to shed the notions of Berners-Lee, for their own reasons. And Berners-Lee was courted by MIT, which then made the commitment to such an international organization, with the original supporters still supporting Berners-Lee as director, personally. Perhaps by his and their influence, US government funds were lobbied for the new group, and similar governmental monies were had in Europe, and Japan. Separate centers were opened - 'host sites', to draw funds for permanent staff from W3C headquarters, itself. Companies joined the combine by paying fees based on company sales. And the fees tended to be too much for various academic institutions. And independent consultants were frozen out, entirely (unlike at the present time). And the new group were not even proprietors of very much. Berners-Lee didn't even have the rights to - http.

The early days were a period, I think, of attempting not merely to establish what W3C was up to, not merely to establish some 'peace' in the 'browser wars', or between the agendas of various host sites, but more to establish credibility particularly with Microsoft and the new Netscape (which early on, was dominant as the successor of Mosaic, and before Microsoft began to perhaps unfairly compete with an Internet Explorer increasingly bound to its trademark OS; and which browser is clearly now the winner of the 'browser wars', for a couple of reasons). Both companies routinely implemented proprietary HTML/server extensions, meant to freeze out the competition. It meant web page incompatibility between browsers, or the idea of separate pages, CGI generated or not, for each - or more.

And the W3C wanted to separate HTML presentation from pure mark-up; or something generally less proprietary, by Microsoft and Netscape, at any rate. But the pitch was weak, and generally not convincing. And HTML had already incorporated the principal presentation tag, namely the TABLE tag. In addition, the validators presented by W3C, on its own website, were explicitly set up to fail on any such proprietary extensions, and proved rather useless to web page developers (and sparked the rise of flexible validators, such as htmlvalidator.com, originally called, CSE3310). The arguments between W3C 'purists' and the 'designers' was that between those arguing for 'backward compatibility' and denuded and uninteresting 'government report' design schemes, and those arguing for expanding the frontiers, and using new technologies wherever presented. These were the boom years of the internet, after all.

Even so, W3C continued to try and find 'peace' among browser manufacturers with somewhat loose specifications into the version 3 of the HTML standard. But a newer, more restrictive (in form, but not content), mark-up language (or in this case, meta-language) has now been implemented, called XML. And this has fallen to W3C. And Microsoft has eagerly implemented this, and the related technologies, in its msxml.dll libraries - going on version 5, as of this date (using only proprietary external function calls to its own scripting, and a few other things, as proprietary extensions). Also with XML, the next generation of HTML is then to comply with XML, as XHTML (sort of HTML 5.0, as it were). Futhermore, DSSSL scripting was broadened and incorporated into XSL, which goes together with XML in producing XHTML complaint output, and other formats, as well, hoping perhaps to replace a host of server-side transform technologies with such XSL. All of this falls to the W3C, principally, though hardly exclusively (msxml.dll is, after all, from Microsoft), among the myriad of standards organizations and consortiums, and even still those companies attempting to seek proprietary advantage.