Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for January 2003

Opera Released… Within Limits

Opera Software on Tuesday shipped version 7.0 for Windows of their Web browser, with a caveat that carries significant implications for CSS standards support. c|net published a story on Monday which quotes Opera's CEO as saying: “ ‘ We have contacted Apple and asked them if they want a third-party browser, and we'll see ...

By Ben Henick | Filed in Browsers

Minor Administrative Post

We have upgraded our blog software to Moveable Type version 2.5.1. The upgrade should be seamless, but if not, please cut us some slack. :)

By Steven Champeon | Filed in WaSP Announcement

DOM Support Resource

The tireless Peter-Paul Koch has updated his useful DOM Compatibility Tables. Look here to find browser support for DOM Levels 1 and 2, both Core and HTML. Includes information on the new Safari 1.0 and Opera 7 beta versions. (Hat tip: the mighty Glish.)

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in DOM

SVG 1.1 now a Recommendation

The W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics 1.1 Specification made it to full Recommendation status this week. This version incorporates the errata from SVG 1.0 and breaks the Spec up into modules that can be used as building blocks for creating focused language profiles. Along with SVG 1.1, two such profiles for mobile ...

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general)

Safari in the news… Again

Today Dave Hyatt announced that Safari is going to "support XML". It's not 100% clear what this means... except to echo others in saying that the browser ecosystem is becoming an interesting place again.

By Tim Bray | Filed in Browsers

DOM Level 2 HTML Spec Official

The W3C released the Document Object Model Level 2 HTML Specification today as an official Recommendation. Of particular interest is this note: This specification renders the DOM Level 1 HTML Recommendation obsolete given that some changes from DOM Level 1 HTML are incompatible with that specification but represent more accurately ...

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in DOM, W3C/Standards Documentation

Check, please!

For you Mozilla users out there: The current Project of the Week over at mozdev.org is Checky, a great little add-on that makes validating your pages so easy you'll have no excuse not to. Checky adds a submenu to Mozilla's context menu that allows you to run whatever page you're ...

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Validation

Safari: Fast, Incomplete

We held our breath for a day as Web citizens took Apple's new Safari browser for a test drive. Safari is obviously built for speed, with a number of optimizations made to its Konqueror-based rendering engine to boost its performance well beyond that of Mac IE5 and Mozilla variants. However, we ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in Browsers

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