Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for July 2005

Sortable Lists

Nifty demo of drag’n'drop sortable lists using JavaScript and CSS.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

IE7 Beta 1 and Standards

In a must-read post on IEBlog, Chris Wilson lays out some of the web standards fixes planned for IE7. While it doesn't hit everything we might like, and we won't see most of it until Beta 2, it's a pretty impressive list for a release that by all accounts is primarily ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

JavaScript and Screenreaders

What do you get when you cross JavaScript with a screen reader? James Edwards, Bob Easton, Mike Stenhouse and Derek Featherstone find out.

By Derek Featherstone | Filed in Accessibility, DOM Scripting TF

That’s why it’s Called Beta

I woke up this morning to find countless emails and IMs pouring into my accounts asking me about the IE 7 beta. Some developers are expressing relief at seeing some of the bug fixes and improvements, but of course as I've been expressing all along, this is a process with ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers

Best Practices

A nice round-up of best practices for using JavaScript.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Collaborative bug squashing

Lucian Slatineanu is putting together a DOM script to replace the default form widgets supplied by the browser with other, more customisable elements. He calls the script Niceforms.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in Accessibility, Bugs, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Accessible Event Pairs

In order to keep our pages accessible to non-mouse users, we must use non-mouse events like focus or keydown in addition to mouse events like mouseover and click. On QuirksMode.org I created the new Event pairs page to study this problem.

By Peter-Paul Koch | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Meeting Microsoft

Since the announcement of the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force we’ve had two face to face meetings. The first was held in Portland, Oregon at WebVisions ‘05. WaSP members DL Byron and myself met with Microsoft’s liaison to the Task Force, Brian Goldfarb. In this meeting, we brainstormed potential ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Browsers

Calling all CSS-Savvy Designers

Kevin Lawver, AOL's representative to the CSS Working Group, is making a plea to the design community to give the Working Group feedback on the CSS3 Borders and Backgrounds module. It isn't often one gets the opportunity to help define the tools you'll be using in your job, and this is ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in CSS, Design, W3C/Standards Documentation

Unobtrusive Flash Objects

Bobby van der Sluis just published a new article: Unobtrusive Flash Objects (or UFO). His script allows you to specify a placeholder DIV for a Flash object with a message meant for noflash browsers. The script then silently checks if the user has the proper Flash version, and if so replaces ...

By Peter-Paul Koch | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Image Previews with DOM and CSS (and a dash of PHP)

Sometimes it might be a good idea to give visitors an insight of what is lurking behind a link. Normally this is achieved via a thumbnail, but what about inline links?

By Christian Heilmann | Filed in CSS, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Mehr Presse

Jo Bager has written a short-but-oh-so-sweet blurb on our humble Task force for Heise Online. Vielen Dank, Herr Bager!

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM Scripting TF, General

Accessible Alternative vs. Direct Accessibility

The progressive enhancement approach, also called the ‘accessible alternative’ approach, is indeed the most common and best-understood. It’s not the whole shooting match, though. There’s a second approach to making ECMAScript-enhanced pages accessible: direct accessibility.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Presentation Slides with DOM and CSS

Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations. My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.

By Christian Heilmann | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF, General

JavaScript and WCAG2.0 progress

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (or WCAG) is a series of pointers and tips on making web content accessible to people with disabilities (with a useful side-effect of making the content more accessible to practically all devices). JavaScript has a bigger profile within the current WCAG2.0 work.

By Mike Davies | Filed in Accessibility, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

The DOM Scripting Task Force

In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project today announced the formation of the DOM Scripting Task Force.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Welcome

Here it is: the website of the newly formed DOM Scripting Task Force, set up under the auspices of the Web Standards Project.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM Scripting TF

WaSP Interviews Dr. Vito Evola

The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before. Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He's applying ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Education, Education TF, WaSP Announcement, Web Standards (general)

SiteMorse: Not making friends or influencing people

You might imagine that accessibility specialists are slightly odd folk. Close your eyes and imagine them sitting quietly in the corner of a pub, sipping mild and wearing Hush Puppies. On a crazy night they might break out the box of dominoes and make remarks about how wonderfully accessible those ...

By Andy Clarke | Filed in Accessibility

Accessibility Discussions: Article and Commentary Roundup

Ever since we announced the WaSP Accessibility Task Force, quickly given the sticky nicky “ATF” the recommendations, requests and even a few ragings have been storm-trooping 'cross the Web. Here's a round-up of reading associated with ATF activities. Requests and recommendations The following articles focus on requests from the ATF, recommendations, and general ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility

WaSP to Collaborate with Microsoft to Promote Web Standards

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is collaborating with Microsoft to promote Web standards and help developers build standards conformant Web applications. Today we formally announce the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force. WaSP's goal is to provide technical guidance and advice as the company increases Web standards support in its products ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement

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