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Buzz Archives: Action

JavaScript and Screenreaders

What do you get when you cross JavaScript with a screen reader? James Edwards, Bob Easton, Mike Stenhouse and Derek Featherstone find out.

By Derek Featherstone | July 28th, 2005

Best Practices

A nice round-up of best practices for using JavaScript.

By Jeremy Keith | July 27th, 2005

Collaborative bug squashing

Lucian Slatineanu is putting together a DOM script to replace the default form widgets supplied by the browser with other, more customisable elements. He calls the script Niceforms.

By Jeremy Keith | July 25th, 2005

Accessible Event Pairs

In order to keep our pages accessible to non-mouse users, we must use non-mouse events like focus or keydown in addition to mouse events like mouseover and click. On QuirksMode.org I created the new Event pairs page to study this problem.

By Peter-Paul Koch | July 21st, 2005

Unobtrusive Flash Objects

Bobby van der Sluis just published a new article: Unobtrusive Flash Objects (or UFO). His script allows you to specify a placeholder DIV for a Flash object with a message meant for noflash browsers. The script then silently checks if the user has the proper Flash version, and if so replaces ...

By Peter-Paul Koch | July 20th, 2005

Image Previews with DOM and CSS (and a dash of PHP)

Sometimes it might be a good idea to give visitors an insight of what is lurking behind a link. Normally this is achieved via a thumbnail, but what about inline links?

By Christian Heilmann | July 20th, 2005

Mehr Presse

Jo Bager has written a short-but-oh-so-sweet blurb on our humble Task force for Heise Online. Vielen Dank, Herr Bager!

By Chris Kaminski | July 19th, 2005

Accessible Alternative vs. Direct Accessibility

The progressive enhancement approach, also called the ‘accessible alternative’ approach, is indeed the most common and best-understood. It’s not the whole shooting match, though. There’s a second approach to making ECMAScript-enhanced pages accessible: direct accessibility.

By Chris Kaminski | July 19th, 2005

Presentation Slides with DOM and CSS

Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations. My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.

By Christian Heilmann | July 18th, 2005

JavaScript and WCAG2.0 progress

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (or WCAG) is a series of pointers and tips on making web content accessible to people with disabilities (with a useful side-effect of making the content more accessible to practically all devices). JavaScript has a bigger profile within the current WCAG2.0 work.

By Mike Davies | July 18th, 2005

The DOM Scripting Task Force

In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project today announced the formation of the DOM Scripting Task Force.

By Jeremy Keith | July 18th, 2005

Welcome

Here it is: the website of the newly formed DOM Scripting Task Force, set up under the auspices of the Web Standards Project.

By Jeremy Keith | July 18th, 2005

WaSP Interviews Dr. Vito Evola

The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before. Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He's applying ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 13th, 2005

WaSP ATF: Already A Smoking Gun?

It's not even two days since WaSP announced the formation of the Accessibility Task Force, quickly coined the “ATF” by several folks despite a more sobering U.S. federal agency that goes by the same initialism (or would that be acronym?). While clearly a long time coming, the immediacy and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 25th, 2005

WaSP Accessibility Task Force

I am very pleased to be able to publicly announce the formation of the WaSP Accessibility Task Force. Bringing together accessibility specialists from across the world, the Accessibility Task Force will work with accessibility organizations, technology vendors and others to help promote Web accessibility. The Task Force members include several WaSPs and ...

By Andy Clarke | June 23rd, 2005

Opera to Use acid2 Beyond the Desktop

Opera Software plans to use the acid2 test not only to improve implementation and correct bugs within the desktop browser, but then do so for its mobile browsers, too. Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and CEO of Opera Software, writes: “When our rendering engine gets it right, you can expect to see ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 18th, 2005

iCab, Konqueror pass Acid2

In a dramatic upset, perennial Mac browser also-ran iCab has edged out Linux browsing heavyweight Konqueror for second place in the Acid2 stakes. Despite some recent controversy, Konqueror developers were able to use about half of Safari driver Dave Hyatt's Acid2 efforts to boostrap their own successful Acid2 campaign. Some great work ...

By Chris Kaminski | June 7th, 2005

Hiram College Conversion

A college website, multiple authors, and web standards — how can it be done? The WaSP Education Task Force asked Jonathan Linczak, webmaster and project lead, about the conversion of Hiram College to a standards-compliant website. Jon had been reading about and using standards on sites he had developed before he ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | June 2nd, 2005

Practical Ajax

Cameron Adams, the antipodeon man in blue, has written a nice hands-on guide to using Ajax. The article, over on SitePoint, is called Usable Interactivity with Remote Scripting.

By Jeremy Keith | May 10th, 2005

Acid2 Goes on Safari

Yesterday Dave Hyatt posted news that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, making it the first browser to do so. Patches to enable Acid2 related support have been made available in Hyatt’s announce post, linked above. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be unfair to simply announce the news, so I ...

By Ben Henick | April 28th, 2005

Acid2: Putting Browser Makers on Notice

Those with long memories will remember ABBA. The rest of us may just about recall the good work of the CSS Samurai when they launched the Acid Test back in 1997 and challenged makers of browsers world-over to improve their support for CSS 1. Well, dammit, we're at it again. No, ...

By Drew McLellan | April 13th, 2005

The Acid2 Challenge

In a public effort to encourage Microsoft to add as much CSS 2 support as possible as its developers embark on IE7, Håkon Wium Lie (CTO of Opera Software and the father of CSS) and the Web Standards Project have begun the development of a test suite, known as "Acid2." The ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 16th, 2005

Dreamweaver Task Force

The WaSP's Dreamweaver Task Force has posted an assessment of Dreamweaver MX. The Task Force worked with Macromedia through various stages of product development to help improve Dreamweaver's support for web standards and accessibility.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | July 9th, 2002

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