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Buzz Archives: Authoring Tools

Support the W3C Validators

The W3C has launched a donation and sponsorship program to support the free validators provided by the organization. Give today!

By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 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

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

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

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

Which is better for the web: single vendor homogeneity, or OSS/Web 2.0-style innovation?

Brendan Eich, the principal creator of JavaScript and one of the leading developers for the Mozilla project, follows up his SXSW presentation, which illustrates parallels between historical examples of user-community-driven innovation and the current state of affairs in the web useragent space. (Say that fast ten times.) In today’s post ...

By Ben Henick | March 12th, 2007

Feeling validated

The W3C validator is a great tool. It allows developers to quickly and easily find and fix the inevitable problems that creep into any markup document. As well as the quick'n'easy version, the advanced interface allows you to get a more verbose output. Until recently, one of the options was to ...

By Jeremy Keith | October 31st, 2006

Flash, JavaScript, UX, standards, apologia, apologies, and one man’s opinions

The recent discussion of plug-in implementation, here and elsewhere, points to broader issues that affect everyone who is invested in web standards adoption.

By Ben Henick | August 18th, 2006

Microsoft Expression Preview Release

Set to debut in June of 2006 Microsoft has publically released a free trial preview of its newest web authoring tool, Microsoft Expression Web Designer.

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 15th, 2006

Lessons that the standardization process can teach us

Over at Six Apart they’re working to turn Trackback into a standard, and WaSP emeritus Anil Dash shares some of the wisdom he’s gained from the process. Some of the points he makes have bearing on the things we’re trying to accomplish over here at WaSP…

By Ben Henick | May 1st, 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

Yahoo Releases its User Interface Library

Graded Browser Support, design patterns library, user interface library. Its been a busy day over at the Yahoo Developer Network.

By Jeremy Keith | February 14th, 2006

AJAX for Eclipse

IBM, Mozilla, Zimbra and Dojo announce a project to develop AJAX widgets for Eclipse.

By Chris Kaminski | February 2nd, 2006

Developer Resources

Yahoo have just added a JavaScript center to their Developer Network.

By Jeremy Keith | December 18th, 2005

Tool for tracking IE memory leaks

Drip, the IE leak detector.

By Chris Kaminski | December 6th, 2005

WaSP Microsoft Task Force Update: Upcoming Products, XAML, Acid2, SXSW, and IE7 Revealed

The WaSP Microsoft Task Force held another face-to-face meeting with available members on Tuesday. We met in a Starbucks along the waterfront in rainy Seattle. While the setting might have been a bit predictable, the conversation was unique and at times, very encouraging. WaSPs at the meeting were DL Byron ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 2nd, 2005

Debugging JavaScript with jsTrace

Aaron Gustafson gives us a very handy tool for debugging scripts: jsTrace.

By Jeremy Keith | October 27th, 2005

XML Nanny: Validation Tool

For those who design and develop their sites on a Mac, Todd Ditchendorf has developed a handy tool to help validate XML and XHTML documents from the comfort of your own desktop. XML Nanny cares for your XHTML documents in places the W3C web-based validation service can't reach... Suppose you are ...

By Drew McLellan | September 19th, 2005

Microsoft Dropping Support for XHTML1.1

Or at least they're dropping support for it in ASP.Net 2.0. Is this a bad thing? The initial reaction might be one of shock and indignation, that it is a step backwards. Another response might be to accept that it's a realistic decision to make and one that actually helps ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 1st, 2005

Meeting Microsoft

Since the announcement of the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force we’ve had two face to face meetings. The first was held in Portland, Oregon at WebVisions ‘05. WaSP members DL Byron and myself met with Microsoft’s liaison to the Task Force, Brian Goldfarb. In this meeting, we brainstormed potential ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 21st, 2005

Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I just got home from Macworld Expo, and I spent some time looking around through the eyes of someone who cares about Web standards… The good: If you have OS X, and you don't have TextWrangler 2.0 from Bare Bones, go download it now. It's okay, I'll wait. Back now? Hey, ...

By Dori Smith | January 15th, 2005

GoLive to Join CS 2.0

According to ThinkSecret, a revived GoLive 8.0 will join Creative Suite v2.0 to be released in early 2005. The news item reports Adobe is working to improve the handling of CSS content including a toolbar for adjusting CSS layouts.Also getting a makeover is the grid element for CSS DIV ...

By Meryl K. Evans | September 24th, 2004

MacRabbit

MacRabbit is a new CSS editor for the Mac. I haven't had a go with it yet, but the extraction feature alone, which allows you to suck down the CSS for an arbitrary site using a custom user agent string so you can 'spoof' different browsers and circumvent browser-sniffing, looks ...

By Chris Kaminski | September 20th, 2004

FrontPage Horrors

>Frontpage 2003 is still the current version in August of 2004? I guess that's the problem with using a date in your product name. Or maybe it's an indication of a larger updating problem. >Here's [an article][1] featured on the FrontPage homepage within the Office website: "Create a structured page layout ...

By Meryl K. Evans | August 20th, 2004

Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE/Win

Chris Pederick's outstanding Web Developer Toolbar has long been a must-have tool for web developers & designers using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Now, webheads who're still using IE for Windows (yes, there really are some, and they deserve our pity ;-) have a comparable tool: the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Much ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 13th, 2004

W3C Log Validator updated

A new version of the W3C Log Validator was announced by Olivier Thereaux yesterday on the W3C's validator mailing list. The new version (v 0.3) has added features, bug fixes, and two new modules - CSS Validation and an experimental survey module. Do you need to convert a large web site ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | June 9th, 2004

Ohio State University: Kudos

Looking for a web standards job? This morning while reading an unrelated article about finding a job that suits work standards, I thought why not use Google to find openings for web standards jobs? My Google search terms, *job openings web design standards guidelines accessibility* returned results that included The Web ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 2nd, 2004

W3C Link Checker Stands Alone

The W3C link checker has been upgraded, and a standalone version released. You can: Check your links online. Download the standalone link checker utility. Both the service and the standalone tool are free. As always, the W3C is openly soliciting your feedback and bug reports about its validation products and services.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 2nd, 2004

Amaya 8.3 Ready and Waiting

The W3C's Amaya browser and authoring tool version 8.3 has just been released. It's available as binary downloads for a variety of platforms, and the source code is available. New features include improved CSS support and support for MathML.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 10th, 2004

WYSIWYG CSS Editors Coming of Age?

The good folks at westciv have released a new version of their style editor, Style Master 3.5. I took some time to work with it today and was rather impressed. There are some super cool features such as a browser support watcher, multiple ways of viewing and applying properties and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 4th, 2004

XForms Validation

The XForms Institute announced the launch of its new Web service, currently in beta: Free Online XForms Validation. The site also hosts interactive XForms tutorials and content from the O'Reilly book, XForms Essentials authored by Micah Dubinko. The online service validates XForms documents by URL, file upload and text area input ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | February 23rd, 2004

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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