Buzz Archives for April 2003
We do declare:
If the ESPN and Wired redesigns (among others) are factors encouraging you to develop standards-compliant sites, visits to the W3C QA Interest Group article about standards compliant development techniques and their full list of valid DOCTYPE declarations are must-reads.
By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Check one… Check two… Sibilance
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The Checky project has released version 1.5 of their great little validation add-on for Mozilla, Phoenix/Firebird, Beonex and Netscape. New in this version is the ability to check files on your local filesystem with the services that accept file uploads, like the W3C's markup and CSS validators. Other additions since the ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Validation
- W3C remixed
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The winners are in for the WThRemix contest. The challenge was to come up with a fancy new design for the W3C homepage using valid, accessible XHTML and CSS and eschewing tables.
By Anders Pearson | Filed in Design
- Tools And Views You Can Truly Use
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A couple o' cool tools are now available—the kind you really want because you'll actually use them. What's more, they're free. First up is LogValidator, a new utility from the W3C that works using your server's logs. It validates the most frequently visited pages allowing you to clean up your high-traffic ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Validation
- Top of the Charts
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For those of you who loved Eric Meyer's terrific CSS browser charts and lamented their disappearance upon the shutting down of WebReview's servers, lament no more! Netscape's DevEdge has not only published these much-loved CSS Support Charts on DevEdge, but has done so under a Creative Commons license, ensuring that this ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in CSS
- .course { cost: free; }
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Whoever said there was no such thing as a free lunch never sat down to dine with the great folks at Westciv. If you're looking to beef up your CSS layout skills, add a dash of spice to your forms, and serve up non-screen media, you need to place your ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Training
- The tables are turned
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Dave Hyatt: Safari to drop table support. The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page. Auto width tables will ...
By Mark Pilgrim | Filed in April Fools
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 |