Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives for April 2006

A DOM Scripting Wishlist for Microsoft

Peter Paul Koch has kick-started a discussion called “IE 7 and JavaScript: what needs to be fixed?”

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in Browsers, Bugs, DOM, DOM Scripting TF, Microsoft

Accessibility and UK small businesses

Take a look at the latest study coming out of the United Kingdom examining the attitudes and perceptions of small business toward accessibility.

By Derek Featherstone | Filed in Accessibility, General

The WaSP Café

Kazuhito Kidachi, the WaSP liaison in Japan, has started a new series of events dubbed the "WaSP Café". It is a social gathering where people can chat about web standards and related topics while drinking a nice cup of coffee. As Kazuhito says, "Why coffee? Because to talk seriously, it's ...

By Faruk Ateş | Filed in General, Outreach, WaSP Announcement, Web Standards (general)

Accessibility TF Manifesto

The ATF has put a lot of effort into looking at the world to analyse the issues standing in the way of broader accessibility for everyone. Having worked out the problems we face and what we are willing to tackle, we are now happy to present the Accessibility Task Force ...

By Matt May | Filed in Accessibility, Accessibility TF

Tasty Bites for Standardistas

John Oxton reveals some tasty web standards morsels for you to have a nibble on.

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Web Standards (general)

WaSP International Liaison Group

With a growing interest around the world in Web standards, international relationships are becoming key. WaSP is seeking to create an International Liaison Group for the sharing of Web standards related information worldwide.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in General, Internationalization, Outreach

Print-ready poster: separation in a nutshell

Natalie Jost put together a print-ready poster, available as a PDF file, which describes the benefit of standards-friendly development techniques in a visual way. It's behind a link within the entry in question. Try it, you might like it. It's one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" ...

By Ben Henick | Filed in CSS, DOM, HTML/XHTML, Outreach

Painless Node Creation with DOM Builder

Dan Webb’s DOM Builder takes the finickiness out of standards-based markup generation.

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

DOM Builder

Now here’s a script we can get behind… Dan Webb’s DOM Builder combines the ease of innerHTML with the precision of DOM methods.

By Jeremy Keith | Filed in DOM, DOM Scripting TF

Notre Dame Web Group

Lead Web developer Steve Smith and the University of Notre Dame Web Group tackle web standards and accessibility in original and exciting ways.

By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Education, Education TF, General

Spiffy Markup?

A new time-saving tool to create rounded corners constructed with CSS does the rounds – but is it really so spiffy?

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in CSS, Web Standards (general)

Blogger – Can I get in please?

How Blogger blocks users from getting past the front door when the browser is JavaScript-capable but is sitting behind script blocking firewalls – and how it’s not alone in making this mistake.

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

Show Us Yer White Bits!

It’s almost April the 5th and time for the first CSS Naked Day

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in CSS

Protecting the Children

WaSP and PANIC announce new recommendation for Child-safe Hypertext Markup Language.

By Porter Glendinning | Filed in April Fools

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