Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for September 2002

IE Only? Not necessarily.

KPMG Canada recently earned the wrath of Mozilla and Opera users for blocking the latter and presenting the former with incomprehensibly unusable visual garbage in place of a layout. Though the site’s markup is poor, that’s not the problem; the problem is outdated, brain-dead browser detection and related scripting. Eric ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Browsers

XHTML 2 and You

Among the unknown but probably smallish percentage of front-end designers who know and care about and use web standards, the announcement that XHTML 2.0 will not necessarily be backward compatible with XHTML 1.0 has caused some alarm. An article in IBM’s development zone claims this lack of backward compatibility is ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Kentucky!

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is making a serious effort to Do The Right Thing as regards their Web presence. Check out the templates page. It's good to see the public sector being public-spirited.

By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Extinct: IE for Unix

Cam Barrett reports that Internet Explorer has been discontinued for Unix. Pity. If you can't bear to part with the *nix, perhaps now is a good time to take Mozilla 1.1 out for a test drive.

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in Browsers

Standards and Usability

The W3C and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have issued a call for papers for the NIST Usability Workshop. The workshop is interested in the usability of W3C specifications, how W3C specs affect the usability of software based on them, and how to improve the overall usability of the web.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Usability

Flash for XHTML?

Here's some weird convergence: DENG is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript. Accessibility issues aside, the concept of an embeddable, standards-compliant browser that renders XHTML and CSS with better accuracy than most desktop browsers is an exciting one. A week ago I had the ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in HTML/XHTML

One Man’s Journey

Randal Rust's Alphabet Soup: A web designer's journey to standards and accessibility describes how one man came to understand markup, css, and accessibility techniques. An informative, enjoyable read, especially for those new to standards.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility, Web Standards (general)

Yay Lycos! (We Think)

This showed up on a public W3C list back in July and just came across our radar. Obviously good news if true. I can't find an example deployed anywhere else but jscript.dk. Anyone have an update for us?

By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Browser Upgrades, Netscape Style

Visit Netscape’s homepage using Netscape 4, and you may be asked to download Netscape 7 before proceeding.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Browsers

It has architecture?

W3C has a Technical Architecture Group (TAG) that's supposed to worry about corner cases and consistency. Last week marked the publication of the TAG's first cut at an overview of the Web's architecture. It's not light reading, and it doesn't say a thing about design or style or HTML, but those ...

By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)

WaSP at Digital-web

Digital Web, a darn fine webcentric pub, has WaSP stuff this issue, including a state-of-the-art Zeldman rant and a nice three-way conversation with Steven Champeon and Shirley Kaiser. Check it out!

By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)

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