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About W3C Standards
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When the Internet, and later the World Wide Web, became mainstream, applications were available via a server, and software displayed on the client. The communications protocols were still the domain of software vendors, but it became clear that new standards ones were needed. At first the vendors tried to manage this between themselves, but different visions and stakes showed that an independent party was needed. Therefore the 'World Wide Web Consortium', or W3C, was created.
Today, the need for standards is greater than ever. The number of software vendors has exploded since the early years of the Internet. It would be unmanageable if all vendors needed to discuss a common protocol. At the same time, web application developers can't be expected to learn a different protocol for each vendor, particularly when keeping up with the newest technologies is essential. Standards help ensure that developers can learn and adopt a limited number of protocols to be able to develop for a large variety of platforms.
The W3C is one organization that makes interoperability possible. Even companies that were initially opposed to such an organization are now finding their way to this democratic method of designing common protocols. With web services becoming increasingly popular, where applications communicate with each other instead of users, not conforming is unthinkable if you want your sites or information to be accessible to a broad audience. For an overview of this topic, read the discussion at World Wide Web Consortium.
Although a specific protocol may not seem ideal for a given solution, it probably still serves to follow a standard. Not only does it make cross-vendor interoperability possible, it ensures that developers can focus on producing software rather than spend all their time learning yet another syntax.