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Buzz Archives: CSS

Beyond the Blue Beanie?

You put on your blue beanie every year. But you can make a difference throughout the year. For several years, web workers passionate about web standards have donned blue beanies for one day to bring attention to the importance of using web standards, keeping the web open, and continually moving it ...

By Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis | November 30th, 2011

HTML5 logo: W3C takes a step in the right direction

With a little back-pedalling, the W3C has moved away from their blanket characterization of modern web tech as “HTML5”.

By Chris Mills | January 28th, 2011

HTML5 logo: be proud, but don’t muddy the waters!

In which we ask that the W3C to come up with a new monicker for the umbrella of modern web technologies.

By Chris Mills | January 18th, 2011

IE9 looks really promising

The IE9 “developer previews” continue to impress. HTML5, CSS3, & speed improvements FTW!

By Aaron Gustafson | June 28th, 2010

IE8 Has Arrived

With a greater focus on standards-compliance, it seems possible that Microsoft’s latest browser may redeem itself in the eyes of standards-savvy designers and developers.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 20th, 2009

CSS Working Group feeds back to WaSP

Almost exactly a year ago, I asked all interested web professionals to let the CSS Working Group know what they want from CSS. Fantasai, an invited expert in the working group has published her feedback on our requests with information on what the Working Group has done about them. It's unclear ...

By Bruce Lawson | January 16th, 2009

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

Chris Mills of Opera Software ASA announced today the release of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. The initial 23 of 50 proposed articles are published and available.

By Rob Dickerson | July 8th, 2008

What do you want from CSS3 – one week left

(Polish translation) As part of the outreach work we're doing in partnership with the W3C's CSS Working group, we invited all web professionals to tell the Working Group what they want from the next version of the spec. As the Working Group's face-to-face meeting is at the end of March, we will ...

By Bruce Lawson | March 2nd, 2008

Acid3 nearing completion

If you’re a fan of the Acid browser tests, you already know that Acid3 is in the works. It’s now in a “final review” state, so please check it out and submit your feedback.

By Kimberly Blessing | February 5th, 2008

Community CSS resources roundup

It's been in beta for some time but last week Sitepoint made their new CSS Reference available on the Sitepoint website as a free community resource. Authors Tommy Olsson and Paul O’Brien have created an incredibly detailed and complete reference to CSS, not simply listing the various properties and syntax but ...

By Rachel Andrew | February 4th, 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

Tell the CSS WG what you want from CSS3

The W3C's CSS Working Group charter expires on 1 July 2008, so the group will be discussing its revised charter in March this year. Fantasai, an Invited Expert in the group, has put out a call for web professionals to help the working group prioritise its work: The CSSWG plans to ...

By Bruce Lawson | January 18th, 2008

IE8 passes Acid2 test

Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer's dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This doesn't necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, ...

By Bruce Lawson | December 19th, 2007

Opera complains to Europe over IE lock-in

Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to unbundle Internet ...

By Bruce Lawson | December 13th, 2007

The Email Standards Project

We all know that email clients aren’t consistent in their support of Web standards. Crafting an HTML email that renders correctly on most email clients is a delicate process which typically involves extra coding and a lot of guesswork. Up until now, we’ve begrudgingly accepted life this way… but a new effort aims to change that!

By Kimberly Blessing | November 28th, 2007

Amazon allowing CSS customization

In a fairly interesting move, Amazon is now allowing aStores to be customized using CSS.

By Aaron Gustafson | August 16th, 2007

It’s time to get naked again

Dustin Diaz has plans for us all – it involves us getting naked. But only for a day and a bit.

By Ian Lloyd | April 3rd, 2007

Current and Upcoming CSS3 Support in Opera

Here’s a look at CSS3 support and upcoming support in the Opera desktop browser.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | January 22nd, 2007

CSS Turns 10

Hard to believe it, but Cascading Style Sheets are ten years old!

By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 2006

New book: Web Accessibility – Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance

Those who remember the (now defunct) seminal Glasshaus book Accessible Web Sites may be interested to know that friends of ED have just released a completely reworked and expanded successor: Web Accessibility - Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.After an overview of the accessibility law and guidelines, and a discussion about ...

By Patrick Lauke | August 20th, 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

It Was 5 Years Ago Today …

It’s been just over five years since the publication of a couple of articles about using CSS for layout were published, but where are we now?

By Ian Lloyd | June 7th, 2006

Print-ready poster: separation in a nutshell

Natalie Jost put together a print-ready poster, available as a PDF file, which describes the benefit of standards-friendly development techniques in a visual way. It's behind a link within the entry in question. Try it, you might like it. It's one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" ...

By Ben Henick | April 17th, 2006

Spiffy Markup?

A new time-saving tool to create rounded corners constructed with CSS does the rounds – but is it really so spiffy?

By Ian Lloyd | April 5th, 2006

Show Us Yer White Bits!

It’s almost April the 5th and time for the first CSS Naked Day

By Ian Lloyd | April 3rd, 2006

!important Fixed in Later IE7 Releases

It was brought to my attention today that the IE7 Beta 2 Preview wasn't honoring the role of the !important declaration and as such was causing alternative box model hacks to fail. !important is important for several important reasons. First is the very reason !important exists, which is to ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 3rd, 2006

Star HTML and Microsoft IE7

Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for IE Platform and Security at Microsoft, and Position is Everything's Big John Gallant have been having a conversation about * html in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7 for Windows (IE7). Wilson has been encouraging CSS designers and developers to repair any bug-specific hacks ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | December 22nd, 2005

Prince 5.1 Passes Acid2

Prince, a program that converts XML documents styled with CSS into PDF files for printing, has passed the Acid2 test. While Prince isn't a browser per se — it's a file converter — it does join Konqueror and Apple's Safari as the first CSS & HTML implementations to pass the ...

By Chris Kaminski | December 10th, 2005

Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions

This Thanksgiving I’ve decided it’s about time that I provided some more background and analysis on one of the things I am certainly unintentionally (in)famous for.

By Tantek Çelik | November 27th, 2005

An Open Letter to Disney Store UK

Dear Disney Store UK, I would write this to you directly via your site feedback page but it is throwing Access database errors. The email appears to be down as well. So instead, I'm going to write my letter here in a public forum in the hopes that someone from your ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 3rd, 2005

IE7 Conditional Comments

In mid October, the IE Blog urged developers to stop using CSS hacks to workaround IE's problems, and start relying on Microsoft's proprietary conditional comments. I wrote up my thoughts about the new syntax, and it seemed practical enough considering that IE7 is looking to address most of the reasons ...

By Dave Shea | November 3rd, 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