The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization that produces standards for the World Wide Web. It is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language) on which the Web is based.
A standard goes through the stages Working Draft, Last Call, Proposed Recommendation and Candidate Recommendation. It ends as a Recommendation. It's up to the manufactures to follow the recommendations which is the case for many of them.
See also: Cascading Style Sheets, DOM, SVG, XML, WAI
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump