The W3C (or World Wide Web Consortium) was founded by and is still led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and develops the base technologies that support information on the Web.
There are about 60 W3C staff (photo), spread around the world but attached to MIT (USA), ERCIM (France), Keio University (Japan) and Beihang University (China). Then there are around 400 member organisations that provide guidance and resources for the numerous Working Groups.
In addition to HTML, CSS and XML, we have created many fundamental Web standards related to such things as privacy, graphics (eg. PNG and SVG), multimodal interaction, document styling (CSS, XSLT), voice, Web services, the Semantic Web, etc. We also have horizontal activities ensuring that principles of internationalization, accessibility and device independence are applied to Web technologies we develop.
The W3C standards (called ‘Recommendations’) lead the Web forward, and are typically well ahead of existing practice. Their aim is to improve interoperability between users of the Web – ie. provide common formats that enable people to collaborate.