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I've been following these organizations (institutes, entities, whatever) for near 3 months now, and both of them claim that they're trying to make the Internet a better place. They're creating documents under the name of RFC (for IETF) and Recommendation (for W3C) to guide others.

Yet another organization called WHATWG has started another path to develop web, and another community is in action under the title of Internet Society.

I don't know, why many organizations? I mean, can't they simply get merged? Are they really different? How?

Adam Lear
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Saeed Neamati
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2 Answers2

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IETF works on Internet protocols, particularly at OSI layer 3 and 4.

As you may or may not know, the Internet comprises more than the WWW, which is simply an application-layer protocol. The W3C works on WWW specifications.

stackoverflowuser2010
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IETF focuses on packet/line/terminal/telnet based protocols.

W3C adresses SGML/HTML/XML inspired stuff.

You may also be interested in IEEE, an organization that instead loves communications on the physical layer. (with frequencies/tensions/radio-waves and all that oscilloscoping stuff)

ZJR
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