In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was set up to lead the Web to its full potential with a US Host at MIT and a European Host at INRIA in France. Funding was provided by the European Union via the WebCore Project which ran from December 1994 until January 1997.
In 1996, the European Commission funded a follow-on project called W3C-LA, a Leveraging Action with RAL and INRIA as partners that established a set of W3C Offices across Europe as National Points of Contact providing mirrors of the W3C site, performing translations of key documents and running local awareness events and producing a set of shrink-wrapped demonstrators of the new emerging standards such as CSS, HTTP 1.1, SMIL, WebCGM, and eventually SVG.
W3C-LA ran from November 1997 until March 1999 and established W3C Offices in the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece and Italy.
The W3C UK Office's at RAL launched UK News as part of its local activities. The early additions were produced as a two-column double-sided single page used to raise awareness of the World Wide Web in the UK, and which could be mailed because most companies did not have access to the Web.