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Buzz Archives: Browsers

Updating IE

Internet News has an article discussing a possible upgrade to Internet Explorer. I must say I don't put much stock into their speculation that IE7 may come out prior to Longhorn, the next upgrade to Windows. And some of the features they mention — like pop-up blocking and a download ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 9th, 2004

Netscape Lives!

It doesn't have the cryptic appeal of 'Frodo Lives!' scrawled on a subway station wall, but it does have the advantage of being true: an updated version of Netscape — version 7.2 — is due on August 3rd. Based on version 1.7 of the Mozilla suite, Netscape 7.2 won't be ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 28th, 2004

The Value of Samaritanism

Inspired by the Odeon debacle, former WaSP extraordinaire Jeffrey Zeldman holds forth on the value of good samaritans who build accessible, standards-compliant versions of popular web sites for free. Zeldman also gives an excellent analysis of the accessibility and usability problems with Odeon's official site and how samaritan Matthew Somerville addressed ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 28th, 2004

Popular Magazine Not Cool with Us

Family Circle Magazine's Web site gives you the upgrade your browser message when viewing it in Mozilla v1.7, Safari, or FireFox v0.92. Opera v7.5, however, does work. Ah, after more than double my coffee in take due to a bad night's sleep, I have woken up to why it doesn't work. ...

By Meryl K. Evans | July 26th, 2004

Honey. Vinegar. Flies.

While I'm quite sure this post won't be seen by the folks who most need to read it, I feel the need to speak up. In a post discussing his new fan site, Robert Scoble notes the surfeit of vitriol directed at the IE Team in the comments to their blog. ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 25th, 2004

IE SP2 Preview

Release Candidate 2 of IE for Windows XP SP, Microsoft's security-minded update of IE, is available. The update promises tighter security, which means potential knock-on effects web developers will need to account for. IE Team member Tony Schreiner has details.

By Chris Kaminski | July 23rd, 2004

Blogging IE

The recently-reconstituted Internet Explorer team has a new blog. Not much there at the moment but the usual fluffy first posts, a smattering of links to blogs belonging to various IE team members and mentions of the ever-popular IE Wiki. No doubt that'll change soon enough, though. Definitely worth ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 23rd, 2004

Happy Anniversary, Moz!

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the Mozilla Foundation, Happy Anniversary to you! Mozilla has been around for a long while, though the Mozilla Foundation is one year old today. It has been a great year for the project. On their anniversary page today at Mozilla...It's already been a year ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | July 15th, 2004

WHAT’s going on?

Over on the WHAT WG front, Ian Hickson has posted an update on the progress of WHAT WG in their efforts to develop backwards-compatible extensions to HTML. Ian’s post includes some very interesting background to the formation of WHAT and the impetus behind their efforts. Joe Gregorio has some other ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 10th, 2004

What’s in a namespace?

Following up on Anders Pearson's Safari post, Dave Hyatt has decided to use namespaces for the Apple's HTML extensions. The move seems to have largely satisfied Eric Meyer and Tim Bray, though Eric would still like to see a different DOCTYPE used. Personally, I agree with their ultimate conclusion: things ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 10th, 2004

safari extensions

Dave Hyatt and the Safari team have been busy lately adding support for a number of extensions to html to be used by the upcoming Safari RSS reader and Dashboard. On the list is IE's contenteditable, along with a slider widget, search fields, a composite attribute on the <img/> ...

By Anders Pearson | July 8th, 2004

Tell it to the IE Team!

Ever wished you could give your opinion directly to the IE team at Microsoft?Here's your chance! They're making themselves available for an online chat Thursday, July 8, at 10:00 am Pacific. See you there?

By Dori Smith | July 7th, 2004

Internet Explorer Too Risky

Tired of standards woes related to IE 6.0? So are we. There's been a lot of discussion about how to handle this both at WaSP and around the Web, with some individuals taking a 'wait-and-see' stance and others suggesting an anti-IE protest. Well, if more articles hit the commercial ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 29th, 2004

Just One Reason Why We Put An End To The Browser Upgrade Campaign

Those who have followed the WaSP for several years will remember the Browser Upgrade Campaign, a spirited attempt to get rid of old, weak, and infirm browsers that lacked support for Web standards through encouraging people to upgrade to new, strong, and healthy browsers with strong bones and a shiny ...

By Steven Champeon | May 7th, 2004

Opera, IBM voice

ZDNet this week, offers up news where Standards meets Accessibility and Emerging technology with “Opera's browser finds its voice,” by Matt Loney and Paul Festa. Opera is adding voice control to its browser, enabling users to browse the Web and fill in voice-enabled Web forms by talking to their PC. ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 26th, 2004

IE Navigation Just Got Better

We've had the ability to add navigation options via the link element for accessibility purposes for some time now. But as with so much of what ails, user agent adoption has been slow in coming, especially for Internet Explorer. Users of Mozilla may already be familiar with the Site Navigation Bar, ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 22nd, 2004

why you foxy browser, you

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 0.8 of Mozilla Firebird, but with a slick new name, “Firefox”. As the browser proceeds toward its much anticipated 1.0 version release, it continues to please many people with its clean lines, fast rendering, and of course - excellent commitment to web standards. Along with ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 9th, 2004

Lunch, Internet Explorer, and You

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee and prominent weblogger, recently had lunch with Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. You read that correctly: there is an IE team, and they're apparently hard at work. After providing some insight into how the development team operates, Robert asks his readers what they'd like to ...

By Ethan Marcotte | January 14th, 2004

:hover in MSIE

You may have seen the Pure CSS Menus demo on Eric Meyer's css/edge, it has been around for a while. The premise: pure CSS menus, no scripting necessary. The catch: they don't work in Internet Explorer. Well, not so fast. Thanks to Peter Nederlof, with a slight bit of script-based tweaking ...

By Dave Shea | January 4th, 2004

Browser Testing

Of course, it's always important to test standards-based work amongst the myriad browsers on the market today. A standard can only be a standard if the software supports it. While we're getting closer, we're not at the point yet where we can build our code and rely on every browser ...

By Dave Shea | December 2nd, 2003

Validity of Eolas Patent To Be Reexamined

Apparently (and thankfully) swayed by the W3C's impassioned appeal, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has agreed to reexamine the validity of the Eolas patent: “A substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry has essentially raised a question of patentability with respect to the 906 patent ...

By Ethan Marcotte | November 12th, 2003

More than one Internet Explorer

Fellow WaSP Ethan Marcotte has stumbled across a gem of a find — turning Microsoft's recent patent headache into an opportunity, a clever Chicagoan designer has discovered that the new 'patent-friendly' version of IE highlights a hole that allows the simultaneous install of IE5.01, IE5.5, and IE6.0 all on the ...

By Dave Shea | November 6th, 2003

Gooey Standards

Microsoft's announcement of their new XML-based GUI language, XAML (pronounced 'zammel'), at their Professional Developers Conference has focused attention on XML-based GUI languages. This is an area that has seen a tremendous amount of activity over the past few years, mostly out of the spotlight. Here's a partial overview of ...

By Chris Kaminski | October 30th, 2003

Dumb Browser Sniffing, Microsoft Style

We have mentioned this before: browser sniffing is stupid if you only end up getting it wrong. If you need more proof, try visiting Microsoft's Office section using Firebird 0.6 and you will see this gem: "Warning: Viewing this page with an unsupported Web browser. This Web site works ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 28th, 2003

Longhorn and XAML

A rumor popped up near the end of last week that Microsoft would be announcing a new markup language for building web applications, comparable to Mozilla's XUL. Today Microsoft made good on the rumor with a few bits and pieces from the distant Windows Longhorn release at its Professional Developer's ...

By Dave Shea | October 27th, 2003

Putting The (Big) Cat Among the Pidgeons

So OS X 10.3 is now available, and it looks good to me. Fellow WaSP Mark Pilgrim has already compiled a useful 11-page site detailing all the new features, but there was one thing that struck me about the new OS - and that is the new version of Safari. Normally, ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 27th, 2003

The Old Dinosaur Gets a Makeover

For those who haven’t already found out, there are two great pieces of news about Mozilla. First up, there’s a new version of the excellent power user-friendly browser – now at version 1.5. Find out about the new features here. The second bit of good news is that the Mozilla site has had a re-working by Dave Shea (of CSS Zen Garden fame). …

By Ian Lloyd | October 17th, 2003

Click Here, You Idiot

Trust me, you will feel like an idiot for visiting any web page that forces you to click OK to continue loading elements on the page. But get used to it, because it is - or is very likely - going to happen, thanks to the recent ruling in the ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 8th, 2003

New Browser Updates Announced

New versions of Mozilla and Opera Web browsers have been announced by the Mozilla.org open-source project and by Oslo-based Opera Software ASA, respectively. For Mozilla's part it was another beta release - version 1.5 and among the new features are a spellchecker for MailNews and Composer an overhaul ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 2nd, 2003

Sorting it Out

A few of articles to help put the AOL announcement into perspective: C|Net has a summary of the AOL and Mozilla Foundation announcements. The story contains a couple of factual glitches. First, the AOL-Microsoft settlement didn't guarantee AOL would use IE; it guaranteed that AOL could use IE royalty-free for the ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 16th, 2003

Eulogizing Netscape

Though Mozilla lives on, the Netscape-branded browser is well and truly dead (or 'in maintenance mode', as the PR wonks call it). Eulogies and opinions are popping up around the Web. Already weighing in are standards and design maven Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS Guru and Netscape evangelist Eric Meyer, tech industry pundit ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 16th, 2003

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