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Buzz Archives for April 2005

Acid2 Goes on Safari

Yesterday Dave Hyatt posted news that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, making it the first browser to do so. Patches to enable Acid2 related support have been made available in Hyatt’s announce post, linked above. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be unfair to simply announce the news, so I ...

By Ben Henick | Filed in Acid2, Browsers

Browser Progress

IE team member Chris Wilson has posted about a couple of new developments in IE7: support for alpha-transparent PNG images and fixing a few of the bizarre float-related rendering bugs in Trident, the rendering engine used in IE 4+ for Windows. It's a good start, and happily puts to rest persistent ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Whither Adobe’s SVG Efforts?

What does Adobe's purchase of Macromedia mean for Adobe's SVG efforts? The FAQ (PDF) on the acquisition has this to say:How does this affect Adobe's support of SVG (scalable vector graphics)? Both Adobe and Macromedia have been involved in defining SVG and both were part of the W3C working group that ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Adobe, ‘Rich Internet Applications’ and Standards

Adobe's impending purchase of Macromedia has fueled no end of speculation on the fate of now-redundant applications and hand-wringing over the impact of the acquisition on popular Macromedia applications, not to mention the loss of competition in the space. But all that's really a sideshow. The meat of the ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Acid2: Putting Browser Makers on Notice

Those with long memories will remember ABBA. The rest of us may just about recall the good work of the CSS Samurai when they launched the Acid Test back in 1997 and challenged makers of browsers world-over to improve their support for CSS 1. Well, dammit, we're at it again. No, ...

By Drew McLellan | Filed in Acid2, WaSP Announcement

Penn State Adopts Policy

News from Pennsylvania State University, New Web Policy to Affect all of Penn State's Public Web Sites, gives a target date of August 15, 2005 for compliance to standards, guidelines, and accessibility. Major changes to the web policy were the result of consultation with the Faculty Senate, Web developers and ...

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

Happy Anniversary, MACCAWS

April 2, 2005 marks the one year anniversary (our 2004 Buzz) of documents published by the project team at Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards (MACCAWS). The publications are part of a Kit consisting of a standards primer and a technical white paper. These documents are currently available ...

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

Welcoming More WaSPs

There are a couple of new WaSPs trying out their wings. As mentioned in a previous post, there are actually quite a few things happening in the background with the Web Standards Project, and for that we need committed and skilled people. Two such people are Andy Clarke (aka Stuff ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in WaSP Announcement

Global Style

CSS Zen Garden has been the inspiration for similar projects in other languages: El Camaleón in Spanish by Manuel Guerrero of México (an RSS Feed Available) CSS Zen Sentiero in Italian by Michele Ledda (Javascript needed) Zen-Garden do maujor - Tema de visitante in Portugese by Maurício Samy Silva Also worth a look: A collection of ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in CSS

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