Jaffe helped broker the company's high-profile with competitor Microsoft, which he described in the Web page as an "arch-competitor" to Novell.

He expects these skills to come in handy at the new gig as well.

"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.