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Buzz Archives: Action

British Standard for accessibility

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has invited two members of the WaSP, Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke, to join the drafting committee for the first British Standard for Web Accessiblity. Two years ago, the BSI was sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission to write a Publicly Available Specification ...

By Bruce Lawson | July 11th, 2008

Spry turns two

Adobe’s JavaScript frameworks is maturing, but there’s still room for improvement.

By Aaron Gustafson | June 2nd, 2008

Mozilla Download Day [German Translation]

Mozilla hat sich vorgenommen, ins Guinness Buch der Rekorde zu kommen mit den meisten Software-Downloads in 24 Stunden! Darum wird der 17. Juni 2008 ein besonderer Tag sein: der Download Day. Was wird an diesem Tag so Besonderes sein? Mozilla möchte den Weltrekord aufstellen für die meisten Software-Downloads an einem einzigen ...

By Glenda Sims | June 1st, 2008

EduTF Report Highlights Curriculum Project

The WaSP Education Task Force (EduTF) report updates our activity, announces new members, and offers a report on a Web standards based Curriculum Project.

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 16th, 2008

Acid3 Passed in 23 Days!

On March 3, the Web Standards Project launched the Acid3 Browser Test. On March 26, two browser teams reported that their builds passed.

By Kimberly Blessing | April 7th, 2008

Announcing the Adobe Task Force

Today WaSP announced that the Dreamweaver Task Force will be renamed the Adobe Task Force to reflect a widened scope.

By Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis | March 10th, 2008

Street Team: Make Your Mark

The WaSP Street Team launches its first community project: bookmarks which you can place in libraries, schools, and bookstores to help signal to readers that the material is out of date.

By Glenda Sims | March 8th, 2008

Microsoft rethinks IE8′s default behavior

Perhaps it was our complaining or perhaps it was a reconsideration of its own interoperability principles, but Microsoft has decided to change its course on IE8 and will opt-in to its new standards mode by default.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 3rd, 2008

Acid3: Putting Browser Makers on Notice, Again.

It's been three years since we told browser makes that we want to see them smile, but now we wanna hold their hand. Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser's DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and ...

By Drew McLellan | March 3rd, 2008

What do you want from CSS3 – one week left

(Polish translation) As part of the outreach work we're doing in partnership with the W3C's CSS Working group, we invited all web professionals to tell the Working Group what they want from the next version of the spec. As the Working Group's face-to-face meeting is at the end of March, we will ...

By Bruce Lawson | March 2nd, 2008

WaSP Round Table: IE8′s Default Version Targeting Behavior

One week ago, several WaSP members took the time to have a virtual sit-down with Chris Wilson of Microsoft to talk about IE8′s proposed default behavior of having to opt-in for the browser’s new standards mode.

By Aaron Gustafson | February 24th, 2008

DOM Scripting: A Web Standard

Following @media 2005 — the first Web Standards conference in Europe — a group of front-end coders gathered in a pub in London to discuss JavaScript. JavaScript had a problem. Its reputation was tarnished, to say the least. The common perception of client-side scripting was frozen in the late '90s ...

By Jeremy Keith | February 20th, 2008

Acid3 nearing completion

If you’re a fan of the Acid browser tests, you already know that Acid3 is in the works. It’s now in a “final review” state, so please check it out and submit your feedback.

By Kimberly Blessing | February 5th, 2008

Opting-in to standards support

In this week’s issue of A List Apart, I was (finally) able to reveal Microsoft’s new strategy for forward-compatibility, a strategy that was developed hand-in-hand with several of us here at WaSP.

By Aaron Gustafson | January 22nd, 2008

Tell the CSS WG what you want from CSS3

The W3C's CSS Working Group charter expires on 1 July 2008, so the group will be discussing its revised charter in March this year. Fantasai, an Invited Expert in the group, has put out a call for web professionals to help the working group prioritise its work: The CSSWG plans to ...

By Bruce Lawson | January 18th, 2008

What’s the best test for Acid3?

Now that all the major browsers (and many minor ones) have pledged support for Acid2, Ian Hickson has moved on to preparing Acid3 — and you can help!

By Kimberly Blessing | January 16th, 2008

IE8 passes Acid2 test

Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer's dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This doesn't necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, ...

By Bruce Lawson | December 19th, 2007

UK government accessibility consultation

The UK government has issued a consultation document on Delivering Inclusive Websites. It's not finalised, as the consultation doesn't end until November 13 (my birthday, by the way …) but in its current state it's not a bad document; it rehashes PAS 78, recognises that the only way to find out ...

By Bruce Lawson | November 4th, 2007

Education Task Force Curriculum Survey

The Web Standards Project Education Task Force has created a curriculum survey and seeks input from educational professionals.

By Rob Dickerson | June 13th, 2007

Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac and Windows

As the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off today, Steve Jobs announced the availability of the Safari 3 Public Beta — for both Mac and Windows. Caution: bug reports abound.

By Kimberly Blessing | June 12th, 2007

A review of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, May 2007 Working Draft

In last month's Interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0, we read that:WCAG 2.0 went through several Public Working Drafts in recent years, and a Last Call Working Draft in 2006. Each Working Draft was sent out for public review — altogether to hundreds of individuals, organizations, and lists around ...

By Patrick Lauke | June 11th, 2007

London: Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0

Organised by the RNIB, Shawn Lawton Henry will be talking about WCAG 2.0 at Westminster University, New Cavendish campus on Tuesday 5th June 7pm.

By Mike Davies | May 28th, 2007

Screen Reader User on U.S. National Public Radio

I heard a piece on NPR this morning featuring an atypical screen reader user: atypical because he is not blind.His vision-impairment is caused by a lack of muscle control due to cerebral palsy, effectively making him vision-, mobility-, and dexterity-impaired. The mention of the screen reader is a minor note ...

By James Craig | May 24th, 2007

Current browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

In web accessibility, you’ll often hear emphasis being placed on the duty of web authors to create accessible content. However, this is only one part of the web accessibility equation.One that has been particularly close to me, or rather one that has provided me with a lot of opportunity to ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 20th, 2007

Call for Review: Updated WCAG 2.0 Working Draft

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) invites you to comment on an updated draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), published on 17 May 2007. WCAG 2.0 addresses accessibility of Web content for people with disabilities.The updated WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft incorporates changes ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 17th, 2007

What’s happening with WCAG 2.0?

Following a conversation with Judy Brewer from the W3C back in February, Jared Smith had the chance to interview her and submit some probing questions about what's happening with WCAG 2.0. Thanks Judy...and nice one Jared! See the interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0 in our WaSP Asks the ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 5th, 2007

hAccessibility

By Bruce Lawson and James Craig. (German translation) Microformats are a great idea. They allow the embedding of parsable, semantic data (like contact information and event details) into regular web pages. With the right plug-in, that information can be saved directly to your calendar program or address book. Like Microformats, a ...

By James Craig | April 27th, 2007

Amazon.com to enhance its accessibility

I had to pinch myself to check it's not 1 April yet, because Amazon has always been an invalid, nested-table horror that was a poster-child for inaccessible images, but it seems to be true: Amazon.com, the leading online retailer, and the National Federation of the Blind have entered into a cooperation ...

By Bruce Lawson | March 31st, 2007

A band-aid for browsers

With tongue firmly in cheek, DOM Scripting Task Force member Dean Edwards says: Just what the world needs, another JavaScript library. That hasn't stopped him from creating Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation™. But this isn't a big full-featured library along the lines of jQuery or YUI. Instead, this works more along ...

By Jeremy Keith | March 26th, 2007

WaSP needs you

At the WaSP Annual Meeting at SXSW today, the Web Standards Project announced the WaSP Street Team. Based around the concept of a record company Street Team, the aim is to give you ways to get involved with web standards evangelism in your local area and in the places you ...

By Rachel Andrew | March 12th, 2007

Failed and Flawed Accessibility Organisations

Mike Davies suggests that a number of accessibility related web sites and groups have failed to come up with the goods but still has high hopes for the WaSP ATF and WCAG Samurai.

By Ian Lloyd | February 26th, 2007

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)

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