Today in 1994, the first meeting of the Advisory Committee of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was held at MIT. Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web: “The meeting was very friendly and quite small with only about twenty-five people. Competitors in the marketplace, the representatives came together with concerns over the potential fragmentation of HTML. This was seen as a huge threat to the entire community… the true art of the consortium would be in finding the minimum agreements, or protocols, everybody would need in order to make the Web work across the Internet. This process did not put the consortium in a position of control…. Whether inspired by free-market desires or humanistic ideals, we all felt that control was the wrong perspective. I made it clear that I had designed the Web so there should be no centralized place where someone would have to ‘register’ a new server, or get approval of its contents. Anybody could build a server and put anything on it…if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that would restrict the Web’s growth and the Web would never scale up. Its being ‘out of control’ was very important.”

Today, the W3C announced a new standard that will make it easier for developers and content providers to create dynamic mobile Web applications.