Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives: Action

Maintainable JavaScript

The Web Standards Group (not to be confused with the Web Standards Project) is a grassroots organisation based in Australia dedicated to promoting web standards and accessibility. The organisation's activities have now spread to the other side of the world. The first Web Standards Group event in London was held last ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 18th, 2006

Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit

The Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit provides an easy way for developers and designers to check their sites on IE7. The Toolkit requires a genuine registered copy of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and XP. It includes some very helpful materials for developers wishing to see how sites will render in the browser.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 13th, 2006

Acid2 and Opera 9 Problems?

We’ve received some reports here at WaSP that Opera 9 is not passing Acid2 under certain unique scenarios. We’d like to hear from you in comments if this is the case.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 13th, 2006

Talking about JavaScript in London

JavaScript was just one of the items on the menu at this year's @media conference in London. The panel on JavaScript libraries featured Simon Willison, Stuart Langridge, Peter-Paul Koch, Dan Webb and the host with the most, Cameron Adams. It was a highly entertaining romp through the pros and cons ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 3rd, 2006

PAS78 available free of charge

The British Standards Institution's Publicly Available Specification "Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites" is now available free of charge and for nothing from the Disability Rights Commission. Yay!

By Bruce Lawson | June 29th, 2006

JavaScript beyond the browser

It's always interesting to see Web Standards used in a setting outside the browser. Did you know, for instance, that the chat client Adium can be skinned using CSS? JavaScript is showing up in more and more desktop apps. Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's widgets (formerly Konfabulator) are the obvious examples. But ...

By Jeremy Keith | June 23rd, 2006

Promoting the responsible use of JavaScript: writing, teaching and presenting

The members of the DOM Scripting Task force have been busy writing and reviewing books, teaching and presenting at conferences and workshops, and preparing for upcoming events; focusing on the responsible use of JavaScript, as well as accessible JavaScript. Here’s an update of recent and forthcoming activities our Task Force members are involved in. Next stop is @media 2006 – see you there!

By Mike Davies | June 12th, 2006

London Web Standards Group meeting 14th of July

See Andy Budd and Christian Heilmann talk about “Maintainable JavaScript” and “Who cares about Standards” respectively on 14th of July in London. Cheap as Chips and a good networking opportunity to boot!

By Mike Davies | June 8th, 2006

IBM Endorses Dojo and Lends Accessibility Support

On Monday, IBM officially announced its support for the Dojo Toolkit JavaScript framework. This announcement comes soon after the creation of the Dojo Accessibility email list, and like its other open source donations, IBM’s support for Dojo includes a major emphasis on accessibility for people with disabilities. Several weeks ago, Dojo ...

By James Craig | June 6th, 2006

BrowseAloud respond

Many thanks to Martin McKay, Technical Director and one of the founders of Texthelp (developers of BrowseAloud), for responding to my previous post All aboard the PAS 78 gravy train. In a refreshingly sincere and straightforward email Martin reassured me of his personal commitment to the cause of accessibility and literacy. ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 27th, 2006

WCAG review period extended

The comment period for WCAG 2 has been extended to Thursday, June 22. If you are thinking about giving feedback, I suggest reading the directions for commenters. The ATF will be publishing a broader set of issues shortly, and working to help the WCAG Working Group cover narrower technical issues as ...

By Matt May | May 26th, 2006

On Quality Education

“What college or university has a good program for Web Development (or Design)?” is a question frequently encountered on mailing lists, in forums, or in conversations with others. Many would like to know the answer.

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 24th, 2006

Educating Web Professionals

José Trudel instructs students with a focus on emerging technologies, standards, and skills; providing a strong foundation needed for today’s web professional.

By Rob Dickerson | May 22nd, 2006

Adobe’s Spry Framework for AJAX

Adobe Labs Spry Framework for AJAX – friendly to use, but poor support for standards.

By Drew McLellan | May 12th, 2006

Yes, We Have the Power

Chris Wilson of Microsoft swears to live by the standards sword – or end his relationship if Microsoft doesn’t stay true to the standards course.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 11th, 2006

All aboard the PAS 78 gravy train

With the extensive media coverage following its launch, a large number of businesses, education establishments and government agencies with a stake in the UK online market should be aware of PAS 78 - Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites. Partly due to the cost associated with this document, ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 11th, 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 | April 30th, 2006

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 | April 19th, 2006

Painless Node Creation with DOM Builder

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

By Jeremy Keith | April 14th, 2006

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 | April 13th, 2006

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 | April 12th, 2006

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 | March 30th, 2006

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 | March 29th, 2006

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 | March 28th, 2006

Dean Edwards Speaks

Jonathan Snook interviews Dean Edwards.

By Jeremy Keith | March 20th, 2006

Queen's New Clothes

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

By Steph Troeth | March 13th, 2006

First ATF F2F Meeting

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

By Matt May | March 13th, 2006

Cross-Browser Comparison of Scripting Libraries

A scorecard of scripting libraries.

By Christian Heilmann | March 6th, 2006

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 | March 5th, 2006

Kudos to Michigan State

Michigan State University launched a redesign of its Web site, yesterday. Designed and developed with best practices that follow Web Standards and Web Accessibiity, the university Web site looks good and validates to the XHTML strict doctype. The redesign involved the teamwork of the MSU Libraries, Computing, and ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | February 28th, 2006

Quick Explanation of the Object Literal

Christian Heilmann explains the object literal JavaScript syntax.

By Christian Heilmann | February 17th, 2006

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