Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for December 2005

JavaScript Animation for Beginners

A beginner-level tutorial on JavaScript animation from Emrah Baskaya.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

JavaScript Tips From Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards starts JavaScript tips with speeding up object detection.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Star HTML and Microsoft IE7

Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for IE Platform and Security at Microsoft, and Position is Everything's Big John Gallant have been having a conversation about * html in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7 for Windows (IE7). Wilson has been encouraging CSS designers and developers to repair any bug-specific hacks ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers, Bugs, CSS, DOM, HTML/XHTML, Microsoft, W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general)

A Final End to IE/Mac

Microsoft has announced that they will cease all support for IE/Mac as of December 31, 2005 and will cease all distribution of the software on January 31, 2006. While IE/Mac has become something of a red-headed stepchild in the past couple years, it has a proud history of standards-related achievements, most ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Developer Resources

Yahoo have just added a JavaScript center to their Developer Network.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in Authoring Tools, DOM, DOM Scripting TF

The Bad Old Days Linger On

Most professional web developers understand why browser sniffing sucks, and have long since moved on to more robust techniques like object or property testing to make their sites degrade gracefully in less-capable user agents. But apparently Yahoo! Music didn't get the memo: their site still sniffs browsers, urging Firefox users ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

Prince 5.1 Passes Acid2

Prince, a program that converts XML documents styled with CSS into PDF files for printing, has passed the Acid2 test. While Prince isn't a browser per se — it's a file converter — it does join Konqueror and Apple's Safari as the first CSS & HTML implementations to pass the ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Acid2, CSS

AJAX Mistakes

A good list of DOM Scripting mistakes.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Tool for tracking IE memory leaks

Drip, the IE leak detector.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Authoring Tools, Bugs, DOM Scripting TF

When to use DOM Scripting (and When Not To)

Alex Bosworth has a thoughtful piece on what sorts of apps require DOM Scripting for optimal user experience, and what sorts of apps are better without.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Microsoft Tweaks IE’s Handling of ActiveX, Java

Microsoft has announced that they'll be changing the way IE handles ActiveX controls and Java applets to avoid liability in the Eolas patent suit. The suit, you'll recall, is about a patent held by the University of California and licenced to a company called Eolas. The patent ostensibly covers embedding multimedia ...

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers

24 Ways to Impress Your Friends

It's an online advent calender, and behind each door* you'll find a web development tip/tutorial (all standards-based goodness, of course) to impress your friends with - 24 of them, to be precise. I'd prefer that to a piece of chocolate any day. 24 ways to impress your friends kicks off ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in 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