Past, present and future: An update on W3C’s Strategic Objectives on the 37th anniversary of the Web proposal

Diagram illustrating "Information Management: A Proposal" by Tim Berners-Lee, 12 March 1989

Today’s anniversary of "Information Management: A Proposal" that Tim Berners-Lee wrote on 12 March 1989 prompts me to stop and reflect on the importance of the web, and the key role the World Wide Web Consortium plays in making the web work — for everyone. I want to take a brief moment to celebrate the importance of the platform, and to call out key initiatives from our strategic objectives.

The last time I wrote at the occasion of this anniversary was two years ago. I hinted that while the W3C community has been doing the essential hard work to ensure we are addressing the challenges that the web faces, we as an organization needed to evolve our structure to better listen and increase our reach to include more of the world in our work. Then in June 2025 we identified our strategic objectives for the next few years.

There is absolutely no question that the invention of the web was revolutionary. Since its launch 35 years ago (first via the Line Mode browser available at CERN in March 1991, and then as software on the Internet in August 1991), the web has morphed, evolved and expanded. In the scale of things it rapidly went from a connection means to one of our most extraordinary global commons. The web today is a ubiquitous and multimodal platform that empowers people and enables so many aspects of life — from education to democracy, but also entertainment, commerce, creativity, etc. Billions of people use the web everyday.