Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for March 2006

Government Web Site Failure – Is It So Shocking?

Report reveals poor pass rates for standards in UK government web sites.

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility, General, Validation, Web Standards (general)

Microformat Extensions for Dreamweaver

As part of our remit to encourage the use of web standards amongst the Dreamweaver community, the DWTF has produced a suite of extensions to help make working with Microformats easy.

By Drew McLellan | Filed in Adobe TF, General

Trying to explain the differences between DHTML and DOM scripting with an example

A summary of the issues around DHTML, and the value behind DOM Scripting.

By Christian Heilmann | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Acid2 Supported in Opera One Year Later

Opera 9 passes Acid2, next step for Opera is mobile, and preliminary mumblings about Acid3 have begun.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Acid2, Action, General

Browser Junkies, Get a New Fix

Mozilla announce early alpha of Firefox 2, codenamed Bon Echo

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Browsers

IE 7 Beta Preview 2 Out Now

Microsoft announce release of IE 7 beta 2 after which no more CSS fixes will be addressed – this is as far as it goes for version 7.

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Browsers, General

Dean Edwards Speaks

Jonathan Snook interviews Dean Edwards.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Accessibility First – A Novel Teaching Method

Educator Brian Rosmaita proposes an ‘accessibility first’ approach for teaching web design.

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Accessibility, Education, Training

The Buzz is Black

On March 13, 2006 at SxSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, WaSP unveils a redesigned site.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement

Queen's New Clothes

WaSP eduTF interviews Tim Hannigan on Queen’s University’s conversion to Web standards.

By Steph Troeth | Filed in Education, Education TF

First ATF F2F Meeting

The ATF had its first chance to meet face-to-face during SxSW Interactive in Austin, Texas.

By Matt May | Filed in Accessibility TF

Help Free the Web with WaSP

We've stung, we've swarmed, we've buzzed. Sometimes we've failed to make our mark, other times we've been far more successful. But there's one thing that's certain, and that is as of Monday, March 13th, the Web Standards Project enters a new time in its history, opening the hive up ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement

Cross-Browser Comparison of Scripting Libraries

A scorecard of scripting libraries.

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

Microsoft IE7 Progress: Sneak Preview of MIX06 Release

I'm sitting here with Malarkey and Markus Mielke in Mandelieu, a beautiful town in the south of France. We're here attending the W3C Technical Plenary and Markus has been kind enough to give us a sneak preview of the IE7 release that's expected for the MIX06 event. We've been looking ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers, Microsoft TF

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