Buzz Archives for November 2002
Not So Fast
Apparently the toothpick didn't quite come out clean, so they've stuck Mozilla 1.2 back into the oven and will pull it out again when it's 1.2.1.
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Browsers
- The Latest from the Lizard’s Lair
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The hard-working developers at Mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.2 yesterday. This is the first stable release to include Type Ahead Find. For some time Internet Explorer's Macintosh users have been able to focus on text links by keying in their first few characters, an important accessibility feature that allows links to ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Browsers
- Upgrades to W3C Validator Are Now Live
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The W3C Validation Service today released several improvements to their software. More information on the upgrade can be found at the validator's What's New page.
By Ben Henick | Filed in Validation
- Scalable Vector Graphics Moving Right Along
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The W3C has promoted both SVG 1.1 and the SVG Mobile Profiles Tiny & Basic to Proposed Recommendation status, and has also published the first Working Draft of SVG 1.2. In addition, a great set of tables has been published showing how 15 different SVG implementations fared when run ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Opera Rocks
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The good people at Opera Software have been re-engineering the Opera web browser to play faster, look more fashionable, and to groove with DOM standards more effectively. They've been refining their licks for a while now, and this week are getting on stage to provide us with a sneak preview ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers
- Another invalid relaunch fixed
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The AltaVista search engine relaunched today with a new design, but the spare interface doesn’t use valid markup. No DOCTYPE, even. Sad. As Eric Meyer did with KPMG and Dylan Foley did with MSN, Trip Kirkpatrick has taken it upon himself to fix AltaVista’s markup, showing how easy it would ...
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Get ready to Contribute
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Today, Macromedia announced Macromedia Contribute, a new application that promises to make life easier for both standards-aware designers/developers and the clients who love them. Based on the Dreamweaver MX code engine, Contribute creates beautifully standards-compliant pages for people who both know nothing about markup and have no desire to learn ...
By Dori Smith | Filed in Authoring Tools
- Valid XHTML + Flash
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This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in HTML/XHTML, Web Standards (general)
- Valid Approaches To Content Management
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IN A WORLD...where legacy content and gargantuan management systems routinely churn out inaccessible, invalid HTML...the liveSTORYBOARD CMS is a taking a giant step in the right direction. Like many tools, liveSTORYBOARD offers WYSIWYG editing from the browser, but saves the input in an XML format, using an XSLT engine to ...
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- AIFIA XHTML/CSS Site Launch
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The folks at the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture understand the benefits of structured markup and logical separation of content from style - they've launched the AIFIA site with an attractive XHTML/CSS layout that degrades nicely in older and text-only browsers, and even throws Netscape 4 a little love. ...
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Fun with CSS
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In his new article, Box of Tricks, Joe Gillespie shows how to create multiple link styles, fashion buttons using borders, and create CSS rollovers. A great article, especially because it demonstrates to visual designers the emerging power of CSS over table-based, graphic-heavy designs.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in CSS, Design
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
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 |