Buzz Archives for August 2005
hasLayout and Microsoft Documentation
I've been chatting lately with Markus Mielke of Microsoft. Markus is sprucing up Microsoft's documentation for Internet Explorer. His first article will attempt to remove some of the mystery surrounding “layout”. Ingo Chao and band have supplied some great fixes for anomalies caused by “layout”. Markus' document will explain the mystery ...
By Dean Edwards | Filed in Browsers
- Happy Birthday Opera
-
The big red O turns a big One Zero today - Opera is 10 years young! To celebrate, the company is having a virtual online party, including some party favors, or perhaps that will mean a bit more to you if I translate that as "free Opera registration codes". This ...
- A Heavy Onload to Carry
-
Solving the window.onload problem, Allesandro runs through the pros and cons of possible solutions.
By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization
-
On 21 August the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative released a new resource, titled Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization, which marshals criteria under the title's heading. These criteria are divided into four groups. Social Factors Technical Factors Financial Factors Legal and Policy Factors These documents facilitate the process of developing web accessibility practices ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Accessibility
- World Grows Small(er): Welcome Japan!
-
It is with great pleasure that I introduce Kazuhito Kidachi as the newest member of WaSP. Kazuhito will be our liaison to Japan, working with the growing number of standards-oriented designers there to spread the good word. With joy and pleasure, welcome, Kazuhito. In other WaSP news, here's what's on tap ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement
- DWTF Announces New Members
-
The WaSP Dreamweaver Task Force is pleased to announce the addition of two new members to its ranks. Stephanie Sullivan and Jesse Rogers are both very active and knowledgable Dreamweaver users, who believe in the promotion of web standards. They share the Task Force's common goal of striving to see ...
By Drew McLellan | Filed in Adobe TF, WaSP Announcement
- Comments to U.S. Copyright Office.
-
Yesterday, Tim Berners Lee (W3C) hand and web delivered formal comments, World Wide Web Consortium Comments on Copyright Office Proposal to Use Single-Vendor Web Service to the United States Copyright Office regarding the proposed preregistration system. At the outset, we would like to stress that nothing in this letter should be ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- A List Apart Relaunches
-
Our good friends and colleagues at A List Apart have relaunched with a new design, new structure, and a Rails-based publishing system. Still the same great content, with intelligent commentary and instruction from some of the best in the business, and some of us normal folk too. A List Apart has ...
By Drew McLellan | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- IBM Donates DOM Scripting Accessibility Code to Firefox
-
IBM’s donation will help developers write accessible DOM Scripting applications, and make Firefox browser more accessible all-round.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Accessibility, Browsers, DOM, DOM Scripting TF
- Firefox Market Share Shrinks! The Sky is Falling!
-
Computerworld is running a story claiming that Firefox lost 0.64 of a point of market share in July. The same story has been reported by The Mac Observer with the added spin that Safari gained a bit. And now the good folks over at Digg have picked up the ComputerWorld ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- It’s a World Wide Web After All
-
Put on your clogs and dance, because Happy Clog wants you to. Happy Clog, you say? Isn't that Zeldman's design company? No, no my friends. That would be Happy Cog. Happy Clog is the pun-ny name coined for a new standards group emerging in the Netherlands. The ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- U.S. Copyright Office Doesn’t Get It
-
…this notice seeks information whether any potential preregistration filers would have difficulties using Internet Explorer (version 5.1 or higher) to file preregistration claims, and if so, why. Preregistration of Certain Unpublished Copyright Claims, 70 FR 44878 August 4, 2005 Translation: part of the U.S. Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- Frommelt: Pioneering Web Standards in Higher Ed
-
One of the common hurdles in converting university and college sites to Web standards is due to a decentralized system of Web development within the organization. Daniel Frommelt is the World Wide Web Coordinator for the University of Wisconsin–Platteville and has been instrumental in converting their Web site to XHTML. However, ...
By Steph Troeth | Filed in Education, Education TF, WaSP Announcement, Web Standards (general)
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
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 |