Buzz Archives: April Fools
Purpose of Conficker Worm Uncovered
Late yesterday, members of the Internet Information Security Consortium (I2SecC) working in conjunction with a cadre of white-hat hackers from around the globe were able to identify the purpose of the Conficker worm, which has been able to infect a large number of unprotected computers. Starting today, April 1, this ...
By Porter Glendinning | April 1st, 2009
- New Initiative in Hyper-Localized Social Tagging
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From marking books to tagging people, it’s the logical progression.
By Porter Glendinning | April 1st, 2008
- Protecting the Children
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WaSP and PANIC announce new recommendation for Child-safe Hypertext Markup Language.
By Porter Glendinning | April 1st, 2006
- W32ValidXHTML.A On The Loose
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Antivirus software maker McAfee announced today that a new virus is making the rounds. The infection is spreading with ferocity among Web servers and desktop Windows systems alike, taking advantage of an obscure bug in the SMB file-sharing protocol that allows people named "Denis" to install software remotely without the ...
By Steven Champeon | April 1st, 2004
- March for Web Standards
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As we code, we must make the pledge that we shall always code for the future. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of web standards, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our pages cannot avail themselves ...
By Ethan Marcotte | April 1st, 2004
- Web Standards Perk Up More Than Your Site
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Scientists from Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the W3C today announced the results of a study showing a strong correlation between the use of non-standard, proprietary markup and erectile dysfunction in Web developers. According to the senior researcher Dr. Ella Mensa-Lechter, “Subjects who kept their structure clean noticed a ...
By Porter Glendinning | April 1st, 2004
- The tables are turned
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Dave Hyatt: Safari to drop table support. The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page. Auto width tables will ...
By Mark Pilgrim | April 1st, 2003
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
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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| Title | Author |
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| 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 |