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Tim Berners-Lee Announces World Wide Web Foundation

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes $5 million seed grant.
Watch the speech and award ➜

Tim Berners-Lee, Alberto Ibargüen, Charles Overby

The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.

Learn more about the Foundation and how to become a founding donor during this planning phase.

The Web Foundation effect

One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information. One aspect of these barriers is the ability for Web content to be available in all the languages of the World. For instance, The Unicode standard and HTML support characters in a large number of world languages, but many users may not have the right fonts to display those characters. Fonts for smaller language communities may not be readily available, making it hard to share knowledge in those languages. Since we are just starting this Foundation, we are in the early phases of understanding the extent of this sort of need. But we didn't have to wait long, and Read on ➜

by sboyera on September 18, 2008