Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for February 2003

Opera Hits Flat Note on MS Phones

The relationship between Opera and Microsoft continues to run chilly as the latest CNET News reports Opera won't offer a version of its mobile browser to work on Microsoft-powered smart phones such as the Orange SPV. Users of Windows-CE based phones will have to stick with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, ...

By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in Browsers

One in the eye for IE

It's official, it's standards-compliant and it doesn't work properly in Internet Explorer on Windows - welcome to the new Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) section at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The message of WaSP since it started has always been 'code to standards, build browsers to standards and everyone will ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in CSS

Stop, children, what’s that sound?

17 new WaSPs buzzing. That's right. We have 17 new members, and a fresh perspective on the future. Everybody look what's going down: Read our press announcement, our current opinion, and what the press thinks about the whole noise.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement

New Members, New Directions

We're trying something new here at the Web Standards project. Instead of griping and complaining about poor support for standards, and giving people tools to discriminate against users of non-compliant browsers, we're going to focus on helping site builders deliver sites that work everywhere. In every browser. On any platform. ...

By WaSP Member | Filed in Opinion

Pushing the Edge

Netscape DevEdge revamps their design and front-end structure. In the process, the site itself becomes another beacon demonstrating the possibilities and advantages to be had when web standards and compliant browsers get pushed to their limits. Tableless layout, major accessibility enhancements, CSS dropdown menus (with a minor assist from JavaScript), ...

By Doug Bowman | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Gettin’ Stylish

House of Style, which has been around and promoting the positives of CSS for some time, has announced a new mailing list called CSS-Foundations. The list is geared toward those developers and designers just beginning to get their feet wet with CSS. With an emphasis on practical guidance, peer ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in CSS

Browser roundup

It's been an excellent week for browsers everywhere. Opera Software quickly released Opera 7.01 for Windows, which fixes several reported security holes in 7.0 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Apple released Safari build 60 for Mac OS X, which improves standards compliance and adds XML support. The Mozilla organization released Mozilla 1.3 beta ...

By Mark Pilgrim | 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