The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT. W3C develops web standards through a consensus process to ensure long-term growth of the web. It provides specifications on technologies like HTML, CSS, XML, and more. The standards cover areas like web design, architecture, semantic web, services, devices, and authoring tools. W3C also offers a markup validation service to check documents against specifications.