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Leading the Web to its Full Potential...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. The Benelux W3C Office (W3C-Benelux) is the regional contact point for the W3C activities in the Benelux. The office functions like other national offices do.

W3C-Benelux cooperates with the Belgium and Dutch departments of the Internet Society (ISOC).

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Benelux newsletter

The W3C Benelux Office issues a monthly newsletter in Dutch. This newsletter contains news on W3C activities and events organized by or in cooperation with the Benelux Office. To register for this newsletter send a message to: w3c-benelux@w3.org.

Benelux news

Number One: World Wide Web Consortium

In recognizing the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Boston Globe presents 150 ideas, inventions and innovators that helped shape our world. Proudly we can report that in this list the World Wide Web Consortium has been ranked number one. Here you will find the gallery of the top 50.

The first sentence on the first World Wide Web site had to explain to visitors what exactly this thing was. It described the Web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Oh. Nobody could have imagined that would one day include classified war documents, videos of talking dogs, and the ability to stream movies and instant message with friends. Tim Berners-Lee, the soft-spoken Briton who invented the Web in 1989 while working at a particle physics lab in Geneva, came to MIT in 1994 to help create the World Wide Web Consortium, to help spread technical standards for building websites, browsers, and devices (like televisions) that offer access to Web content. His greatest act of all was actually something he didn’t do: patent his invention or extract licensing fees from those who used his ideas – decisions that helped the Web go global in a few years. “The thing spread largely because I didn’t make World Wide Web Incorporated in 1991,” Berners-Lee has said. When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee, he said it showed that great things could happen to ordinary people who took on projects that “happen to work out.”

Latest news from W3C

The weekly W3C newsletter W3C's most recent news: announcements of standards, major personnel changes at W3C, WWW conferences, new tools and test suites, and patent policy, etc.

For a more extensive news survey see Archive of W3C News


Recent press releases

For a complete survey, see W3C Press releases



The Benelux W3C Office is hosted by the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). CWI is the Netherlands national research institute for mathematics and computer science. It performs both applied and theoretical research. CWI was founded in 1946 to contribute to the post-war reconstruction. From that time, knowledge transfer to society has remained a focus, not only through scientific publications, but also through contract research and spin-off companies. The institute is located on the Science Park Amsterdam and is associated with the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).


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