Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for May 2004

Bookmarks for Standards Testing

In the linkdump to end all linkdumps, Joe Clark has posted a massive list of bookmarks for standards and accessibility testing. With links covering everything from color deficiency to progressive enhancement, Joe's bookmarks are worth poring over for an hour or eight — an excellent, exhaustive resource.

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Tables, easier?

Patrick Griffiths points out a few flaws with those thinking that tables are easier for layout than Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), in his entry, Tables My Ass.One myth is that CSS is 'hard'. It isn't hard. Well, not any more difficult than any other approach. The problem is that experienced ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in CSS

No Peeing in the Pool

Last week, Google reignited the syndication wars by relaunching Blogger with support for the Atom syndication format and API in the free service, but RSS support only in the paid Blogger Pro. A few days later, the W3C fanned the flames by offering Atom a home. Some, including Microsoft über-blogger ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Standards: A Long Term Investment

In Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line, D. Keith Robinson highlights some of the long-term perils of failing to adhere to established standards for web development. It can be tempting to view web standards only in terms of the initial development process - and it's this perspective that can lead to ...

By Drew McLellan | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Webby Award Validation Woes

If content is king then valid pages must be the poor suckers down in the dungeon. The Webby winners were announced today, and while certainly some of the most content-rich, culturally valuable, and technically helpful sites are on the roster of winners, there is only one valid home page among ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in HTML/XHTML, Validation, Web Standards (general)

I18n

I18n — you may have seen this abbreviation before, and you might even know that it stands for 'Internationalization', but do you know how to do it? With 3 new Working Drafts published over the past few days, the W3C has begun addressing content authors directly via their Internationalization GEO program. ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML

The New Blogger

Blogger, Google's popular weblogging service, has just been thoroughly redesigned — and after looking under the hood, it becomes quickly apparent that they've drunk deeply from the web standards kool-aid. In their own announcement of the redesign, Blogger notes that their new blog templates are all CSS based, standards compliant, ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS, Web Standards (general)

Mozilla DOM Inspector

Old news to some no doubt, Richard Rutter reveals that the DOM Inspector built in to Mozilla can be used for, among other things, sniffing out CSS bindings. Ever been stuck looking at an element and scratching your head wondering which, exactly, of the 20 possible cascading style rules is affecting ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in DOM

Just One Reason Why We Put An End To The Browser Upgrade Campaign

Those who have followed the WaSP for several years will remember the Browser Upgrade Campaign, a spirited attempt to get rid of old, weak, and infirm browsers that lacked support for Web standards through encouraging people to upgrade to new, strong, and healthy browsers with strong bones and a shiny ...

By Steven Champeon | Filed in Browsers

Markup Validator Upgrade

Announced today, the W3C has released a big upgrade to their popular markup validation service: (The new release) features new documentation and navigation, and offers helpful explanations and recovery mechanisms instead of fatal errors. To the unpaid volunteers who maintain our trusty steed, a big round of thanks and praise for making ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in Validation

Message To The Messengers

In a nostalgic nod to the past, John Allsopp of WestCiv praises they that went before us as he pays respects to a small group who worked with CSS before CSS was workable. Message To The Messengers sheds some light on the work done in the late 90's by a crew ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS

WYSIWYG + W3C? Y!

This one's for anyone in search of a standards-compliant, in-browser XHTML editor for their CMS (or weblog tool, or webmail client, or... you get the idea) XStandard was built with standards and accessibility in mind: XStandard manages rich content in any language, has strong accessibility features, and supports popular editing options including ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Bold? Italic? It’s all semantic to me.

While we all know a big goal of the W3C's work is to separate our presentation from our document's structure, Matthew Thomas points out that sometimes the proper elements to do the job don't exist. When semantic markup goes bad showcases logical flaws in, for example, replacing all instances of <b> ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Stylin’ Atom, Talkin’ Turkey, Easin’ into Accessibility

Mark Pilgrim's been diving into using CSS to style his Atom feed. He's got an interesting discussion about what he's done plus examples on his weblog. But you have to use a real browser to see it work - I'm sure you're all as shocked and surprised as I ...

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

Ohio State University: Kudos

Looking for a web standards job? This morning while reading an unrelated article about finding a job that suits work standards, I thought why not use Google to find openings for web standards jobs? My Google search terms, *job openings web design standards guidelines accessibility* returned results that included The Web ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Training, Web Standards (general)

It’s Okay to SMIL Again

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) - pronounced smile - is an XML-based W3C specification that offers numerous creative and practical uses for web-based multimedia applications. But, SMIL has been frowning along for years now with no significant activity or momentum. If you've been wondering whether SMIL was headed off to ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation

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