It was the year 1994 that the web came out of the shadow of academia and onto the everyone’s screens. In particular, it was the second half of the second week of December 1994 that capped off the year with three eventful days.
Members of the World Wide Web Consortium huddled around a table at MIT on Wednesday, December 14th. About two dozen people made it to the meeting, representatives from major tech companies, browser makers, and web-based startups. They were there to discuss open standards for the web.
When done properly, standards set a technical lodestar. Companies with competing interests and priorities can orient themselves around a common set of agreed upon documentation about how a technology should work. Consensus on shared standards creates interoperability; competition happens through user experience instead of technical infrastructure.
The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C as it is more commonly referred to, had been on the mind of the web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as early as 1992. He had spoken with a rotating roster of experts and advisors about an official standards body for web technologies. The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science soon became his most enthusiastic ally. After years of work, Berners-Lee left his job at CERN in October of 1994 to run the consortium at MIT. He had no intention of being a dictator. He had strong opinions about the direction of the web, but he still preferred to listen.