Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for August 2004

Standards and Web 3D

Via /.: Former VRML heavyweight Tony Parisi has posted a thought-provoking article on the XML-based, ISO-backed standard for real-time-3D-over-a-network, X3D. While X3D isn't one of our 'core' web standards, Tony has been working on standards — and on making them commercially successful — long enough to have some good insight on ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Heading in the right direction

Nearly two years ago, a new design of the Microsoft.com home page was met with near universal contempt from the web development community. Jeffery Zeldman took them to task for their gratuitous font tags, and Mark Pilgrim heavily criticised their terrible accessibility. Fast forward to today, and the site has had ...

By Simon Willison | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Web Standards a Campaign Issue?

No, not really. But lefty überblogger Kos gets in a good rant about them anyway: Until browser developers learn to embrace web standards and allow for a uniform browsing experience, people like me will write code which will break on someone's browser, somewhere. Of course, Kos is still slogging along in <table> ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers, Web Standards (general)

(Not So) Heavy Chevy

Chevy has received glowing praise for cutting weight and adding polish to their new C6 Corvette. Now they've taken the same approach with their redesigned web site: it's both slimmer and easier to use thanks to semantically-sound, standards-compliant markup. Oh, there's the odd typo here and there, but dig into ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Browsehappy: Bad Grammar for a Good Cause

The Web Standards Project launched on Friday a new campaign dubbed Browse Happy. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to keep a competitive browser on the market, problems with Internet Explorer for Windows continue to mount. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that broad changes to Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows will wait for ...

By Ben Henick | Filed in Browsers

Accessibility Settlements by Priceline and Ramada

The New York State Attorney General's Office [published a press release][1] this Thursday announcing that [Priceline][2] and [Ramada][3] had agreed to make their sites more accessible to visually impaired visitors: >Under the terms of the agreements, the companies will implement a range of accessibility standards authored by the Web Accessibility Initiative ...

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Accessibility, Legal

FrontPage Horrors

>Frontpage 2003 is still the current version in August of 2004? I guess that's the problem with using a date in your product name. Or maybe it's an indication of a larger updating problem. >Here's [an article][1] featured on the FrontPage homepage within the Office website: "Create a structured page layout ...

By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in Authoring Tools

SEO + Standards = ?

Well, that didn't take long. In his follow-up to his 'Silly Expert Opinions' post, Eric Meyer ponts to a test run by Peter Janes. The early results aren't necessarily encouraging. My next question: in the comments to the compooter.org post, Shari Thurow insists that CSS does matter to Google. As proof, ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

SEO Redux

Reading through the comments to the compooter.org article, it seems they contain the beginnings of an interesting, if occasionally heated, dialogue between the SEO and standards worlds. That's a pure good, IMNSHO. If the message of the SES crowd in the comments is indeed what they were preaching at the ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

SEO tomfoolery

compooter.org and Eric Meyer share a laugh at the expense of the panelists and organizers of SES 2004. Some samples of the SEO silliness, as paraphrased by compooter.org: quotation removed due to doubts about accuracy I must say, I've worked with a couple of SEO outfits recently and neither of them spewed ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Netscape 7.2 Released

Via /.: The long-rumored update to the Netscape browser based on Mozilla 1.7, Netscape 7.2, was released today. Personally, I much prefer the lightweight, browser-only Firefox variant of Mozilla, or even Mozilla itself. Still and all, it's nice to see Netscape alive, if only for nostalgia reasons.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE/Win

Chris Pederick's outstanding Web Developer Toolbar has long been a must-have tool for web developers & designers using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Now, webheads who're still using IE for Windows (yes, there really are some, and they deserve our pity ;-) have a comparable tool: the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Much ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Browsers, Validation

A Web Standards Checklist

Once again, Max Design provides a great resource for the standards world: A Web Standards Checklist. The list is meant to help folks understand the breadth of standards and provide a tool for developers. The list examines six distinct areas of interest as follows: Quality of code. This section hones ...

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

You Said the ‘S’ Word!

Vincent Flanders apparently thinks 'standards' is a dirty word. Vincent takes WaSP member Douglas Bowman to task for not including a link to the finished work in his post about a table-free redesign of Microsoft's home page. He has a point. That is, until he flies off into bizarro world ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

IE for WinXP SP2 Explained

Over on IEBlog, group program manager Tony Chor is lifts the kimono on the changes made to Internet Explorer in Windows XP Service Pack 2. While the update isn't available for other Windows versions, and it doesn't offer any improvements to IE's standards support, the security enhancements made to IE in ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.

WaSP co-founder and emeritus Jeffrey Zeldman writes: “I’ve seen people debate whether ‘leading’ web designers are all using the h1 header element exactly the same way on their personal sites. The question isn’t meaningless but it feels small and slightly beside the point. Likewise, the same ancient arguments about XHTML keep ...

By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Moz gets XForms

Via /.: the Mozilla Foundation is teaming up with IBM and Novell to implement XForms on the Mozilla platform.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers, Web Standards (general)

WaSP Interviews: Jim Ramsey

Another brand new car smellin' WaSP interview is live as Jim Ramsey of the San Francisco Examiner talks about redesigning the site into a Web-standards compliant site. Jim is hooked on standards. He discusses how he took the plunge, how the code stays clean for a large and frequently updated site, ...

By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in WaSP Announcement

XHTML and document.write()

Ian Hickson has written a nice little explanation of the problems with document.write() in XHTML documents that are served with an XHTML MIME type.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in HTML/XHTML

Do DOCTYPEs Matter?

A short time ago, Anne van Kesteren and our own Molly Holzschlag had a brief back-and-forth regarding DOCTYPEs. Anne makes the point that whatever DOCTYPE you use, all browsers will treat your markup as 'tag soup' (aka HTML) unless you send it with the correct MIME Type. That is, it's ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Updating IE

Internet News has an article discussing a possible upgrade to Internet Explorer. I must say I don't put much stock into their speculation that IE7 may come out prior to Longhorn, the next upgrade to Windows. And some of the features they mention — like pop-up blocking and a download ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Washington, DC Web Standards Meetup

[Thomas][1], [Kimberly][2], and [I][3] are trying to light a fire under the monthly [Web Standards Meetup][4] for Washington, DC. Pay no mind to what the Meetup site says--we're still getting together tomorrow night at 8:00pm at the [Capitol Hill Capitol City Brewing Company][5] (in the old post office building next ...

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in WaSP Announcement

New co-operation agreement between W3C and OMA

A few days ago, the W3C and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) announced a Memorandum of Understanding that will allow them to collaborate on mobile Web specifications. This formal working relationship enables the two organizations to collaboratively engage in exchange of technical information and contributions. The result will benefit developers, product ...

By Steph Troeth | Filed in Mobile

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