A former executive with IBM and other tech companies has been named the new CEO of an organization in charge of coordinating the technical specifications behind the World Wide Web.
p
The Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is remaining the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Jeffrey Jaffe, 55, will work under him as its CEO. Jaffe replaces Steve Bratt, 53, who left the position in mid-2009 to run a Web foundation also started by Berners-Lee.
p
Jaffe brings both business and technical expertise. He has been vice president of technology at IBM Corp. and most recently chief technology officer at Novell Inc. He also was an executive at Bell Labs.
p
Just as the Web is constantly growing and changing, so is the community around it and so is the consortium, Berners-Lee said in a statement. Jeff’s broad experience gives him a deep understanding of many different types of organizations, which will be invaluable in managing W3C’s evolution.
p
The consortium, known as W3C, writes the technical rules designed to ensure that Web pages can work using different software, different computers and different languages. For example, it created guidelines on how to format Web pages so that they work more easily with software designed for the blind. It also crafts the basic commands for HTML, the Web’s main programming language.
p
W3C’s members include such leading tech companies as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. and institutions such as universities and the Library of Congress. Its main offices are in Cambridge, Mass., Tokyo and the Sophia Antipolis science and tech center near Nice, France.