W3C

Technology & Computing abbreviation · Internet & Web

W3C
Stands forWorld Wide Web Consortium
CategoriesTechnology & Computing

W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet & web abbreviation.

The international standards organization that develops web specifications such as CSS, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, SVG and WebAuthn. Tim Berners-Lee founded it at MIT in 1994, and host institutions were later added in Europe and Asia.

Example: The W3C published WCAG 2.2 as a Recommendation in October 2023.

Usage notes

Specifications move through maturity stages, ending as a W3C Recommendation. Since January 2023 the W3C has been an independent public-interest nonprofit rather than a consortium hosted by universities. Under a 2019 agreement, the HTML and DOM standards are maintained by the WHATWG instead. Pronounced "W-three-C".

More Internet & web abbreviations

  • TLD – Top-level domain
  • TTFB – Time to first byte
  • UA – User agent
  • URI – Uniform Resource Identifier
  • URL – Uniform Resource Locator
  • URN – Uniform Resource Name
  • WAI – Web Accessibility Initiative
  • WASM – WebAssembly
  • WCAG – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
  • WebDAV – Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning
  • WebGL – Web Graphics Library
  • WebRTC – Web Real-Time Communication

See all 76 Internet & web abbreviations →

Edited by the AbbreviationList.com team. Spotted an error or a missing meaning? Contact us.