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Buzz Archives: Browsers

We love to see you smile

Just ten days ago, Dean wrote here about Acid2: there has been no officially released browser that passes the test I'm thrilled to say that that's no longer the case — we have a winner! With today's release of Mac OS X 10.4.3, Apple's Safari RSS (version 2.0.2/416.12) is the first (publicly-released, ...

By Dori Smith | October 31st, 2005

Opera 9, Acid2 and Web Forms 2.0

It seems the latest preview release of Opera comes pretty close to passing the Acid2 test. Apparently there is only one bug left to fix. After the initial announcement of the second acid test, a race began to become the first browser to pass it. Safari won by a streak and ...

By Dean Edwards | October 21st, 2005

IEBlog: Clean up your CSS hacks

The IEBlog today issued a call to action, asking developers to help "clean up" CSS hacks that are failing in strict mode in IE7. Whether you're interested in helping the IE development team or not, consider this: a review of your code could help to clean out some bad CSS ...

By Kimberly Blessing | October 13th, 2005

Got Browser Woes? Think Again.

If you've been losing hair due to browser incompatibilities on the desktop, blame your remaining gray hairs on IE 6.0, Safari or Opera bugs and implementation problems, and have felt the calcium leeching from your tired bones while trying to make standards-based sites compatible in older browsers, you may wish ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 24th, 2005

Developer Toolbar for IE

As mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft have been at work on a web developer toolbar similar to the one available for Firefox. The toolbar has now been made fully available and can be used on IE6 and IE7. I often find myself trying to resolve issues in IE but ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 21st, 2005

MSIE7 Will Not Support application/xml+xhtml MIME Type

Announced a few days ago on the IEBlog: Why aren’t we supporting XHTML when it’s served as the “application/xml+xhtml” media type in IE7? I made the decision to not try to support the MIME type in IE7 simply because I personally want XHTML to be successful in the long run. Obviously this ...

By Dean Edwards | September 20th, 2005

Opera is Free.

While upgrading my Opera Browser to 8.5 today, then vising the community page, I noticed today's Opera news item Opera is Free!. No more ads, better browsing, no more banners. Free. From the Opera Why Free? page: Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | September 20th, 2005

News From the IE Development Team

I can't believe how useful and informative the IE blog has been since its launch. Once the topic of rumour, guesswork and conjecture, what's happening with IE is more open than I could ever have imagined. There is some more news about IE that I wanted to pick through here ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 15th, 2005

Web Developer Toolbar – Update

For all those people who have been itching to try out/update Firefox to the new 1.5 beta but were put off because it won't work with the Web Developer Toolbar, there's good news - Chris Pederick has done a minor update to make it compatible with the new browser. Form ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 14th, 2005

Attention All Developers …

There's a new browser in town. Well, there's a beta update in town - Firefox 1.5 is available as a beta, and the people at Mozilla are asking developers to go give it a whirl. Try it out, see what breaks. If you're an extension developer (Cough! Cough! Chris Pederick!) ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 9th, 2005

IE7 CSS Improvements

Over at the IEblog, Justin Rogers details further improvements to CSS 2.1 parsing in IE7 - particularly when operating in strict mode. On the list is improvements to pseudo-element selectors (like :first-letter), multi-class selectors, and root-node selection. It's all pretty heavy CSS geekery, but it's important CSS geekery, and is as ever ...

By Drew McLellan | September 3rd, 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

hasLayout and Microsoft Documentation

I've been chatting lately with Markus Mielke of Microsoft. Markus is sprucing up Microsoft's documentation for Internet Explorer. His first article will attempt to remove some of the mystery surrounding “layout”. Ingo Chao and band have supplied some great fixes for anomalies caused by “layout”. Markus' document will explain the mystery ...

By Dean Edwards | August 31st, 2005

Happy Birthday Opera

The big red O turns a big One Zero today - Opera is 10 years young! To celebrate, the company is having a virtual online party, including some party favors, or perhaps that will mean a bit more to you if I translate that as "free Opera registration codes". This ...

By Ian Lloyd | August 30th, 2005

IBM Donates DOM Scripting Accessibility Code to Firefox

IBM’s donation will help developers write accessible DOM Scripting applications, and make Firefox browser more accessible all-round.

By Chris Kaminski | August 16th, 2005

Firefox Market Share Shrinks! The Sky is Falling!

Computerworld is running a story claiming that Firefox lost 0.64 of a point of market share in July. The same story has been reported by The Mac Observer with the added spin that Safari gained a bit. And now the good folks over at Digg have picked up the ComputerWorld ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 14th, 2005

U.S. Copyright Office Doesn’t Get It

…this notice seeks information whether any potential preregistration filers would have difficulties using Internet Explorer (version 5.1 or higher) to file preregistration claims, and if so, why. Preregistration of Certain Unpublished Copyright Claims, 70 FR 44878 August 4, 2005 Translation: part of the U.S. Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 5th, 2005

IE7 Beta 1 and Standards

In a must-read post on IEBlog, Chris Wilson lays out some of the web standards fixes planned for IE7. While it doesn't hit everything we might like, and we won't see most of it until Beta 2, it's a pretty impressive list for a release that by all accounts is primarily ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 30th, 2005

That’s why it’s Called Beta

I woke up this morning to find countless emails and IMs pouring into my accounts asking me about the IE 7 beta. Some developers are expressing relief at seeing some of the bug fixes and improvements, but of course as I've been expressing all along, this is a process with ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 28th, 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

One blog leaves, another arrives

A few weeks ago, Apple announced that it was making WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore open source (and got contributions within the first few hours!). Correspondingly, Dave Hyatt's blog, Surfin' Safari, has now moved from here to here. What's cool is that the whole Safari dev team is joining in, so it's ...

By Dori Smith | June 30th, 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

BrowseHappy Now Part of WordPress as WaSP Refocuses Mission

In an effort to refocus energy on advocating for standards from a perspective of universal access and vendor neutrality, WaSP is handing over the reigns of the BrowseHappy campaign to the good folks at WordPress. The move comes after WaSP members examined past and present activities and decided that while the ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 1st, 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

Browser Progress

IE team member Chris Wilson has posted about a couple of new developments in IE7: support for alpha-transparent PNG images and fixing a few of the bizarre float-related rendering bugs in Trident, the rendering engine used in IE 4+ for Windows. It's a good start, and happily puts to rest persistent ...

By Chris Kaminski | April 24th, 2005

Interview with Håkon Wium Lie

Håkon Wium Lie is the CTO of Opera Software and in 1994 proposed the idea of CSS. Håkon is as deeply involved with the Web and with CSS as anyone can possibly be. Recently, he contacted WaSP to ask whether we could host the Acid2 test, which we agreed to ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 31st, 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

IE 7 Rumors

Microsoft Watch has posted an article with rumored details on IE7. That the release will primarily be focused on security, and will include tabbed browsing come as no surprise. They say native (i.e., no Direct-X filters required) support for alpha transparency in PNG is also in the cards. The advance ...

By Chris Kaminski | March 16th, 2005

MS Commits to Better Standards Support in IE 7

Lead program manager for IE Chris Wilson has committed to improving standards support in Internet Explorer 7. While Chris doesn't provide many details about what improvements will be made just yet, he does say that IE's rendering in 'quirks mode' won't see any changes that might 'break' legacy sites. He expressly ...

By Chris Kaminski | March 11th, 2005

All About Firefox

Perhaps this is something that should be added to BrowseHappy, but for now I wanted to draw your collective attention to a page I stumbled upon this morning. It's on one of my favorite web sites, How Stuff Works, and this time Firefox gets the treatment. The chances are, you're ...

By Ian Lloyd | March 4th, 2005

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