Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for June 2004

JavaScript and Accessibility

I have never done that well with JavaScript in general, much less properly integrating JavaScript into my work. I think that the WCAG 2.0 Scripting group might be just the solution I need. The group emerged today to help make the use of JavaScript more compatible with accessibility. I ...

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

Internet Explorer Too Risky

Tired of standards woes related to IE 6.0? So are we. There's been a lot of discussion about how to handle this both at WaSP and around the Web, with some individuals taking a 'wait-and-see' stance and others suggesting an anti-IE protest. Well, if more articles hit the commercial ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers

Hack for Posterity

Proving yet again that she has some sort of compulsive publishing disorder, our very own Molly Holzschlag has just written a new article on Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack Management. Style sheet hacks are a bit of a necessary evil, which can provide an easy workaround to many browsers' CSS ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS

All in the zlog

zlog has just published an excellent interview (no longer online) with our very own Drew McLellan. Drew discusses some of the finer points of web standards, stressing some intelligent, real-world approaches to semantic markup. He also alludes that all's not as quiet on the WaSP front as it may seem, ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Web Standards (general)

The word for today is “Omtp”

Looks like another industry is sick and tired of a non-standard mess. The OMTP group aims to define those platform requirements necessary for mobile devices to deliver openly available standardised application interfaces that will provide customers with a more consistent and improved user experience across different devices, whilst also enabling ...

By Matthias Gutfeldt | Filed in Mobile

Everything

Every article ever written on web standards article, in one place. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration since most of the links are from the past year or two. But it's safe to say that Dan Cederholm and his readers have managed to generate the most comprehensive listing ever ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Ten Questions for Molly Holzschlag

In the latest of its 'Ten Questions' series, the Web Standards Group gets down to the bone with WaSP's own Molly Holzschlag. Covering such issues as the importance of web standards, teaching CSS, and the market relevance of Movable Type, Molly discusses her current ventures, where she's headed and hints at ...

By Drew McLellan | Filed in Web Standards (general)

The IE Team Is Listening

Robert Scoble has provided a helpful list of places you can give your feedback to the Internet Explorer team. Feedback like, say, areas where IE's standards support could use a bit of TLC. This is a great opportunity to provide some polite, useful feedback to the IE team. Stuff like lists ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Mobile Test Cases

Patrick Griffiths is interested in the truth about current mobile support of HTML and CSS. A long-standing tenet of CSS design is that a clean separation of structure and presentation ensures proper degradability; and indeed, comparing a heavily table-laden page against a CSS-driven site on many mobiles proves the latter ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in Mobile

The Real Reason

Andrei Herasimchuk explains the real reason you should care about web standards. Buckle up, it's a long read but worth your time (especially if you're an Isaac Asimov fan.)

By Dave Shea | Filed in Web Standards (general)

W3C Log Validator updated

A new version of the W3C Log Validator was announced by Olivier Thereaux yesterday on the W3C's validator mailing list. The new version (v 0.3) has added features, bug fixes, and two new modules - CSS Validation and an experimental survey module. Do you need to convert a large web site ...

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

Web Standards Survey

Read all about it! We have launched a WaSP Survey and a press release today, “Web Standards: Who Cares Anyway?” Here is your chance to let our project team members know who you are and which challenges you encounter when working with or using web standards. Don't be Shy. ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Good GAWDS

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) launched last week, and we'd like to welcome them to the standards advocacy block. From the press release announcing their launch: The Guild of Accessible Web Designers marked its launch today by calling upon Web designers to embrace accessibility as the cornerstone and ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Accessibility

Election Time

Here in the Great White North we're deep in the middle of election season. Joe Clark [no, not former Prime Minister Joe Clark] and Craig Saila have compiled an "independent, nonpartisan review of Canadian political Web sites" that finds a massive disconnect between the parties running for leadership, and official ...

By Dave Shea | Filed in Accessibility

…and answered.

So, after the gloom'n'doom of the previous post, what is the future of web standards, anyway? Exactly what the WaSP has always said it is: to help web developers do more with less, and pass those savings on to our customers. Want proof? D. Keith Robinson has it. Keith breaks down ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Question asked…

In a recent post to his blog, John Allsopp of WestCiv, StyleMaster and CSS Samurai fame asks who cares about web standards? The post is a terriffic then-and-now of standards, and does a nice job of summing up the state of browser support circa spring 2004, and has sparked a ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

DOCTYPES at Twelve Paces

Sergio Villarreal has a great little article entitled Tables vs. CSS – A Fight To The Death over at SitePoint. It's an excellent blow-by-blow analysis of the benefits to, and drawbacks of, each approach — and naturally, CSS emerges as the author's preferred method. That makes us all sunshine-y inside.

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Where’s WaSP?

This week, the Web Standards Group interviews Simon Willison, who sheds light on a question we've been challenged with in recent months: Where's WaSP? Simon helps explain: “We're still buzzing away. There's been something of a changing of the guard, with older hands moving in to retirement and fresh blood (such ...

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

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