Jaffe will work alongside Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who will remain the organization's director. While Berners-Lee will concentrate primarily on the direction of the W3C's standards, Jaffe will look to streamline the W3C process of working with members.

The W3C establishes standards for Web technologies. With a membership of more than 350 organizations, a big part of what it does revolves around getting parties of different, even competing, interests to agree on things.

"Something I intend to put a lot of energy into is having an extremely open and active dialogue with all the stakeholders of W3C," Jaffe said in an interview. "W3C will have better engagement with the development community."

The job will require a lot of diplomacy, skills that Jaffe seems to have developed at Novell, where he as chief technology officer and executive vice president for products. He left that role at the end of January, following a companywide reorganization.

"If I look at where my time has been spent--a huge fraction has been cultivating significant partnerships; notably with Microsoft, SAP, and IBM," Jaffe in a farewell post in his Novell blog.