Major Present Players, Current Standards, Proposals, Demonstrations of New Technologies, and Newsgroups.
Here are some of the links that may be useful, but you may have to just wander around the W3C Website to find out the current status of the standards underlying the web. Don't give up: there is an underlying organization to their website, reflected in the directory structure, even if many of the public-access pages seem to go across the grain. On the other hand, don't be surprised to see links claimed to be to works in progress that appear to have been orphaned.
For anything else the W3C is willing to be quoted on, look to the Specifications section of the main public page. Just be aware that the section is really called Web Specifications and Development Areas, so don't expect it all to be standardised already, or tomorrow.
which bring us to ...
The place to look for current proposals for new web technologies is the W3C Tech Reports page. You might also want to scan the current W3C Current Activity List for a broader view.
Most of the links below are directly or indirectly available from one of those two pages. Selected proposals are listed here, but you can expect many of these to become unavailable as proposals are updated. If any of these become unavailable, you'll want to try the Activity List and Tech Reports to look for updates.
Other areas to look at for information on proposals made public by the W3C are the News and Updates section, and the Web Specifications and Development Areas section (do not worry: there is more of the latter than the former).
New web technologies are also introduced by other organizations, often with a promise that they will be forwarded to the W3C to become part of an open internet standard -- if everyone else follows the existing de facto proprietary standard, but of course. By no means are all proposals for new web technologies described on the web before they are first implemented. If you want to know what is coming, there is really no substitute for reading online newsletters about the web and the internet, and poking around the websites of major computer industry publishers, as well as that of the W3C.
The W3C maintains a list of other relevant newsgroups.
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