Classroom Companion: Business

15.2.5 
 World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an independent organization in charge 
of standardizing web services. The organization was established and is currently 
managed by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. The charter is 
to standardize and develop the WWW technology and promote WWW-derived 
services. This includes presentation languages (XML, HTML), formats (XForms), 
procedures (SOAP), and protocols (HTTP, HTTPS). The W3C standards are inde-
pendent of the Internet standards. The only requirement is that the Internet exists 
as an underlying network for communications.
15.2.6 
 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE- SA) 
develops standards within a broad range of technologies where telecommunication 
is just one of them. The most important standards are assembled in the 802-series. 
This series includes standards for the Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, body 
area networks, and other local area technologies. These technologies define how 
various types of equipment can be connected to the Internet or interconnected 
locally to form local area networks for different purposes. While all the organiza-
 
Chapter 15 · Standards

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tions listed above are authorized standardization bodies either directly or through 
association with other organizations, the IEEE is not. The IEEE is rather a loosely 
knitted community of scientists and engineers participating in developing the stan-
dards. Despite this, IEEE-SA is one of the most influential standardization bodies 
in the world, having specified most of the local communications technologies sur-
rounding us.