The World Wide Web consortium
This organisation is responsible for web standards. Its director is Tim Berners-Leed who effectively invented the World Wide Web in the late 1990s while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (browser) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Today, it focuses on improving publishing standards such as HTML and XML. XML is an important development in forming what the WWW organisation refers to as the ‘Semantic web’. The consortium also aims to promote accessibility to the web for those with disabilities – for instance, it is working on a voice-based browser. It is also a relatively small organisation, with fewer than 100 full time staff in different countries.