Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives: Authoring Tools

Developer Toolbars

Wouldn't it be nice to have one-click access to the validators? And surely there's an easier way to snap your browser window to a specific resolution without manually dragging a corner? Wouldn't the world be a better place if you could turn CSS off at any time, and back on ...

By Dave Shea | January 12th, 2004

OpenOffice.org 1.1, Standards via Writer2LaTex

For those using OpenOffice 1.1 software, Andreas Bovens has written: Converting OpenOffice.org documents to xhtml 1.0 strict with Writer2LaTeX: a quickguide. With a few changes to the OpenOffice software, Andreas clearly explains and shows how to modify the OpenOffice software to export XHTML Strict using Henrik Just's Writer2LaTeX utility. Also see: Comments ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | November 26th, 2003

FrontPage to Improve Standards Support?

There are encouraging signs that Microsoft might be addressing one of the biggest problems with its FrontPage software - that being the dire quality of the markup that it generates. In a CNet news article entitled Microsoft aims higher with Web software, Melisa Samuelson, a Microsoft product manager is quoted ...

By Ian Lloyd | June 11th, 2003

Get ready to Contribute

Today, Macromedia announced Macromedia Contribute, a new application that promises to make life easier for both standards-aware designers/developers and the clients who love them. Based on the Dreamweaver MX code engine, Contribute creates beautifully standards-compliant pages for people who both know nothing about markup and have no desire to learn ...

By Dori Smith | November 11th, 2002

Dreamweaver and standards

At Macromedia dot com: “Five Steps to More Professional Pages with Dreamweaver MX,” by Drew McLellan of the WaSP’s Dreamweaver Task Force will help designers who use DMX work with web standards and save their visitors bandwidth and time. Short, sweet, and recommended for the DMX users in the house.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | October 31st, 2002

FrontPage gets LIFT

UsableNet announced yesterday it has integrated its LIFT product into Microsoft FrontPage, the vastly popular (though not particularly standards-friendly) web authoring tool. UsableNet’s LIFT, previously incorporated in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, encourages accessible authoring techniques and includes built-in accessibility validators and reference guides. LIFT won’t stop FrontPage from generating proprietary non-standard markup, ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | July 10th, 2002

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

TopStyle Pro 3 Beta Released

Top Style CSS Editor is morphing into a fully integrated CSS/ HTML/XHTML Editor for Windows. Supporting standards since its 1999 inception, this new version will help even more with creating standards-compliant markup for your site. You can download the Pro 3 Beta 3 now (for free) and give it a ...

By Shirley Kaiser | June 7th, 2002

Style Master 2.2

Version 2.2 of Style Master for Windows and Macintosh has left the building. A WYSIWYG tool for CSS design, Style Master can help you get up to speed on the web's standard layout language. Style Master 2.2 supports all of CSS2, as well as the new CSS3 mobile profile.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | June 4th, 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)

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