Went to the launch of this auspicious organisation and its Southern African presence at the Meraka Institute, CSIR on Monday 14 May. The W3C have been credited with “inventing” the internet (along with William Gibson, Al Gore and Bill Gates) but actually their Director is Tim Berners-Lee, of “inventing the World Wide Web” fame. Essentially they’re saw what the browser wars of 97-99 were doing and decided a standards body was necessary, sort of self-appointed marshals of the Wild West.

Bragging rights include the best CSS2 reference for much of the early 2000′s, starting RDF, arbitrating RSS-Atom, extending the extensible Markup Languages. Tim, feeling slightly underachiev-ish, having created the web, decided to make sense of this all and has begun the Semantic Web project. Look at this, as well as the Mobile Web Initiative which Meraka is also doing good work towards.

Incredible: PageRank indicates a 10/10 for W3c.org, first I’ve ever seen!!!