"One of the interesting things about the technology and business world is the diversity of partners and outlooks. Some companies have an open-source outlook. Some have a proprietary software perspective. There are large companies, medium companies, small companies. For the Web to work, it requires an environment of transparent openness and the ability to work with all types," he said.

Before working at Novell, Jaffe served as president for Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies, and as a vice president for IBM.

The W3C has some challenges ahead. The standards body is developing the of HTML, which will be able to better handle multimedia and application-level functionality. The W3C is also looking to extend the Web's reach, via mobile and low-cost devices, to as-yet-unconnected parts of the world.

"There are a large number of areas [of interest]. And that requires either more resources, more streamlined approaches of getting them done, or more priority calls. And so the operational focus of the organization becomes inseparable from what the priorities will be for the technical focus areas," he said.

W3C's last CEO, Steve Bratt, left the spot in 2008 to head the .

Jaffe, who reports for his first day Monday, will work from the W3C's Cambridge, Massachusetts, office.