1. The World Wide Web Consortium

The Web really came into its own in 1993, when the Mosaic consultation software developed at the NCSA (National Center for Computing Applications) was made available on the Internet. By 1996, there were several million Web browsers in use around the world, and over two hundred thousand servers offering users a wide variety of information: presentation of the Musée du Louvre, access to the Library of Congress, electronic newspapers, and more. Figure 1 illustrates the explosion in the number of sites worldwide in the 1990s. By 2000, several thousand new Web servers were appearing every day.

The importance of the Web is mainly due to :