The World Wide Web Consortium is the primary organization that monitors international standards for the World Wide Web. In February of 2012, the organization was made up of 344 members. Its tasks include outreach and publicity, fostering discussion about Web issues, and developing software.

It was on this day, December 18th, in 1997 that the World Wide Web Consortium published HTML 4.0.

The new version of HTML, which was originally called “Cougar,” was meant to replace Netscape’s visual markup features. HTML 4.0 comes in three different variations. “Strict” does not allow deprecated elements, “Transitional” allows deprecated elements, and “Frameset” generally only allows frame related elements.