Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for June 2002

Dynamic XHTML Competition

Are web standards boring? Eddie Traversa thinks not. He’s launched a standards-based Dynamic XHTML Design Competition. First prize: $1,000. Good luck and happy coding.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in HTML/XHTML

PALM GOOD, OMNIWEB NOT SO

Today’s Daily Report includes a dreamy screen capture of The WaSP’s site on a Palm Pilot and a doleful one as viewed in the new release of OmniWeb. Includes writeup.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General

HWG Offers Accessibility Course Online

Taught by Kynn and Liz Bartlett, the HWG/IWA is once again offering their popular Accessible Web Design online course, beginning July 15th. Kynn is a longtime accessibility advocate, past president of the HWG, and author of the upcoming new book, Sams Teach Yourself Cascading Style Sheets in 24 Hours.

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Training

For Love of Bobby

Cast.org’s Bobby (no longer online) does an ace job of checking your site for compliance with the WAI and Section 508 accessibility standards. Not only that, the service is free. So what could be bad? Well, what’s bad is that Bobby itself uses invalid markup, and the URLs it generates to ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Validation

And here I thought they were real people

Mark Pilgrim's been telling stories about Web accessibility at his shiny xhtml 1.1 blog all this week, and plans to keep it up. You'd think that sites like www.section508.gov would be half as conscientious as Mark about such matters, but no.

By Todd Fahrner | Filed in General

Cutting Edge CSS

CSS guru Eric Meyer has added a new css/edge demo, Pure CSS Menus, to his experimental CSS site. Eric created this new CSS popout menu with standards in mind. Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 7.0 support the CSS used for the popout menus so be sure to use one of those ...

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in CSS

London Calling

UK gov’t draft guidelines propose that all British government sites adopt web standards. Recommendations include: use HTML to structure the document, not style it; use CSS for layout; don’t use browser-specific scripting methods; validate against a DOCTYPE; and others that help ensure accessibility. Cheerio! (Hat tip: Matthew Farrand.)

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General

We get mail

This just in: "Congrats on the WaSP relaunch, BTW. I'm sure you'll be happy to hear that the site looks bloody brilliant in my wireless Palm browser." Do things right and reap the rewards.

By Tim Bray | Filed in General

Show us your CSS!

Tim Roberts of wiseguysonly.com is sponsoring a CSS competition in which one lucky winner will receive a domain name and 20MB of free PHP hosting for one year. The top 5 entries will be used as alternate switchable stylesheets for the site. Check out the contest entry rules and make ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in CSS

Web Accessibility and Educational Technology

This month's Educational Technology Review from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) covers technology and accessibility. The offerings include two articles discussing policy and legislation pertaining to Web accessibility compliance by educational institutions. Hat tip to Kathy Cahill from the MIT Adaptive Technology (ATIC) Lab for pointing ...

By B.K. DeLong | Filed in General

New Interview of Eric Meyer at Digital Web

Meryl Evans interviews Eric Meyer, well known CSS guru and author, for this week's Digital Web. Eric is also the Standards Evangelist for Netscape and list chaperone for the css-discuss list. Find out what he thinks about standards, CSS, using tables, accessibility, future possibilities, and even his weekly radio show. See ...

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Welcome back

Smooches to the true believers who flooded The WaSP’s in-box this a.m. In the interest of efficiency: the old Browser Upgrade campaign has been redirected to its new home here, an earlier problem with the RSS feed has been fixed, and we’re cognizant of a horizontal scrollbar in IE5.x/Mac that ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General

Kudos from WebReference

Thanks to Andy King, yesterday's WebReference Update gave WaSP a terrific write-up that also describes some of what you'll find at the new site, including our new Learn section.

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in General

It Lives!

The Web Standards Project, Phase II

By Steven Champeon | Filed in General

Connecticut to Enforce Accessibility Guidelines

According to an article from Government Technology magazine posted in late May, the State of Connnecticut will require consultants, within the state's Department of Information Technology, to take Web accessibility training in accordance with state guidelines - hopefully more states will follow suit. A shout-out and kudos to Accessibility Maven Cynthia ...

By B.K. DeLong | Filed in Accessibility

SVG: The Future Is Now

Today the O'Reilly Network features SVG On The Rise, a thoughtful article on the strengths of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a standards-based alternative to Flash. Be sure to read the section entitled “Why SVG fits into the Web.”

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in General

It’s Spring

The garden has masses of flowers, the tank tops have come out of storage, and the other day, I was walking a friend through some excellent, beautifully-done, just-created pages over the phone, and we weren’t seeing the same things. “Oh, she said, in an embarrassed tone. It’s just stupid old ...

By WaSP Member | Filed in Opinion

Web Accessibility in the NYT

Sarah Horton, a principal for the Curricular Computing division of Dartmouth College's department of Academic Computing and co-author of the famed Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide (which I happened to be my religious text when I first started developing websites) has an excellent editorial in today's New York Times ...

By B.K. DeLong | Filed in Accessibility

Text Sizing Woes

WaSP Owen Briggs has posted 264 screenshots demonstrating text sizing problems and failures across IE, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape. Executive Summary: When trying to make text accessible, even the workarounds to the workarounds fail in some of our best browsers.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General

TopStyle Pro 3 Beta Released

Top Style CSS Editor is morphing into a fully integrated CSS/ HTML/XHTML Editor for Windows. Supporting standards since its 1999 inception, this new version will help even more with creating standards-compliant markup for your site. You can download the Pro 3 Beta 3 now (for free) and give it a ...

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Authoring Tools

Mispaint

One community of web users that you probably don't know about unless you're one of them is the home-improvement culture. Improving your home is tremendously reference-intensive: you're always looking up mildew-resistant paint or miter saw kerf tolerances or lag bolt length tables, and the Web is a boon. Everybody paints, ...

By B.K. DeLong | Filed in General

Hot from the oven

Moz, Chimera, standards, beauty

By Tim Bray | Filed in General

CSS Promise vs. Reality: How Do They Compare?

Mark Newhouse addresses this question in his new article at Digital Web, Cascading Style Sheets, Promise vs. Reality, and a Look to the Future. Mark covers many important areas, including tables vs. CSS layouts, separating style and content, visual control, accessibility, leaner markup, forward compatibility, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, site ...

By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in CSS

W3C Quality Assurance

Want to get involved in helping promote the quality of W3C process and work? The W3C Quality Assurance (QA) working group's goals include planning and process; better, more testable specifications; coordination with internal and external groups; and building and acquiring conformance test materials. For more information on Quality Assurance at the ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation

Mozilla and CSS1, bound at the hip

Don’t you wish everyone did this? The Mozilla Project has published a copy of the CSS1 Recommendation cross-referenced to the remaining bugs in their implementation of same.

By Steven Champeon | Filed in Browsers

Style Master 2.2

Version 2.2 of Style Master for Windows and Macintosh has left the building. A WYSIWYG tool for CSS design, Style Master can help you get up to speed on the web's standard layout language. Style Master 2.2 supports all of CSS2, as well as the new CSS3 mobile profile.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Authoring Tools

Recent Buzz

Our Work Here is Done

By Aaron Gustafson | March 1st, 2013

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

Realizing that this fragmentation would inevitably drive up the cost of building websites and ran the risk of denying users access to content and services they needed, Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP and rallied an amazing group of web designers and developers to help them push back. The WaSP’s primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

• A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.
• HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.
• W3C Community Groups – If you have a passion for a specific web technology, you can help make it better by participating in one (or more) community groups. In particular, you might be interested in one of these: Core Mobile Web Platform, Responsive Images, Web Education, and Web Media Text Tracks.
• WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.
• Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.
• Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.
Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.

Filed in WaSP Announcement | Comments (89)

More Buzz articles

Title	Author
Call for action on Vendor Prefixes	Rachel Andrew
An End to Aging IE Installs	Aaron Gustafson
Beyond the Blue Beanie?	Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
The Sherpas are Here	Aaron Gustafson