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Buzz Archives: CSS

Stylin’ Atom, Talkin’ Turkey, Easin’ into Accessibility

Mark Pilgrim's been diving into using CSS to style his Atom feed. He's got an interesting discussion about what he's done plus examples on his weblog. But you have to use a real browser to see it work - I'm sure you're all as shocked and surprised as I ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 3rd, 2004

WSG Interviews Eric Meyer

The Web Standards Group, known best for their evangelism of standards both online and in the sunny climes of Australia, have posted their Top Ten Questions for Eric Meyer. Eric discusses his new CSS books, along with his opinions on CSS3, where CSS has been, where it's going, and what its ...

By Drew McLellan | April 21st, 2004

NN4.x Layouts

Still stuck supporting Netscape Navigator 4.x? Our deepest condolences. But all is not lost. Found recently: NN4-compatible XHTML/CSS 3 column layouts. (see also: CSS Layouts for Netscape 4) Complicated CSS-based layouts that actually work in NN4? The mind boggles, but there you go — it can be done!

By Dave Shea | April 6th, 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

CSS Spec Updates

Word comes in from Tantek Çelik that the CSS Working Group has been busy. The past few days have seen the publication of the following goodies: CSS 2.1 Candidate Recommendation CSS Print Profile Candidate Recommendation CSS3 Hyperlink Presentation Module first working draft CSS ‘reader’ Media Type first working draft Of particular interest is the new ...

By Dave Shea | February 25th, 2004

Validator, heal thyself?

A long-standing bug in the W3C's CSS validator is receiving some high-profile attention: Jeffrey Zeldman, fellow WaSP Douglas Bowman, and web design magazine A List Apart discuss the validator's seeming unwillingness to parse Tantek Çelik's Box Model Hack, a popular and long-standing trick used to hide CSS from less ...

By Ethan Marcotte | February 6th, 2004

CSS: Beyond the Retrofit

Sure, you've heard the rumors. Heard the kids on the street talking about selectors, inheritance, and structured markup. Want to learn more, but not sure where to start? Well, have no fear — the inimitable Molly Holzschlag is here to help with CSS: Beyond the Retrofit. Taking us ...

By Ethan Marcotte | February 6th, 2004

CSS Filters

A time will come when you simply can't get a CSS-based design working well across the browsers. While there is still debate on the potential side effects of using them, CSS hacks and filters will frequently get you out of a jam. When used wisely and judiciously, they can be ...

By Dave Shea | January 21st, 2004

Nice Menus!

Better late than never. Posted last month, SuperfluousBanter's Didier Hilhorst explores some smokin' menu effects in The Art of Navigation. As noted in the text, some usability and accessibility best practices were harmed in the making of these menus. Proceed with caution (but be prepared to drool).

By Dave Shea | January 9th, 2004

Centering

Horizontal and vertical centering, together at last. Joe Gillespie shows us how at Web Page Design For Designers.

By Dave Shea | January 7th, 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

Writing Efficient CSS

Worried about keeping your CSS lean and mean? Well, toss your style sheets on the treadmill and check out Writing Efficient CSS, authored by the style gurus behind Position Is Everything. Through the intelligent use of shorthand properties, style inheritance, and a host of other handy tips, you'll learn ...

By Ethan Marcotte | December 8th, 2003

Bo, Selectors

From the people who brought you the Listamatic, Listutorial and Floatutorial comes a new CSS tutorial called Selectutorial. In this new tutorial, Russ Weaklyorial explains the mysteryorials of CSS selectors and how you can go beyond the simple type selectors to take advantageorial of inheritance, pseudo classes and how to ...

By Ian Lloyd | December 2nd, 2003

CSS Vault

Do you ever come to the point sometimes when you are designing and the design is just simply not working so you begin to wonder why you are even a designer or could even claim to be one? So speaks Paul Scrivens of 9rules. If you've ever felt the same (and ...

By Dunstan Orchard | November 14th, 2003

To Hack Or Not To Hack?

Now that is a question. Specifically, I'm referring to the use of CSS hacks, tricks that take advantage of known browser bugs to do such things as hiding troublesome CSS from specific browsers but not for others. Some markup purists believe them to be as evil as mal-formed XML or ...

By Ian Lloyd | November 13th, 2003

A Shopping Cart That Checks Out

No matter how hard we try, there will always be web sites that refuse to validate, don't want to play ball where it comes to accessibility and laugh in the face of table-free CSS layouts - and mostly these sites are the type that are generated dynamically (be that a ...

By Ian Lloyd | November 12th, 2003

QuirksMode

Looking for the ultimate learning resource for CSS, Javascript, and the DOM? What about a remarkably complete listing of current support levels amongst the major browsers? Even a news source devoted to Javascript? Peter Paul Koch delivers, and how. Launched just today is his brand new QuirksMode, over a hundred and ...

By Dave Shea | October 29th, 2003

CSS-licious Mezzoblue menus

Fellow WaSP Dave Shea has recently implemented a gorgeous CSS-driven dropdown menu that demonstrates the flexibility and power of standards-based design.

By Ethan Marcotte | October 28th, 2003

Standards/Markup Article Round-up

Some good stuff that I've stumbled across that readers may find of interest. Bzzzzzz. Why Tables For Layout is Stupid - Whoa- that told you! Seriously, although the title of this presentation (from the Seybold 2003 in San Francisco) may seem a bit too admonishing for some, you cannot ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 28th, 2003

Teaching You How To Float

News from Sydney: Russ Weakley from Max Design tells about a new tutorial to add to the already excellent and much linked-to Listamatic and Listutorial - the Floatutorial. As the name suggests, it illuminates that black art of CSS web design that makes table-free web pages possible by careful use ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 14th, 2003

You Old Dog, You!

Well, perhaps not that old - HTMLdog was launched last week and aims to put HTML and CSS training under people's noses while not making a great song and dance about the standards compliance. "The underlying philosophy behind this website is to focus standards-compliant HTML and CSS ... but ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 13th, 2003

Tableless Layout Generator

Firdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customize layouts easily only by completing forms. Create 2-column and 3-column layouts with the online application. [Link: Webreference]

By Meryl K. Evans | October 7th, 2003

CSS-P in Current Browsers

In this month's WPDFD, Joe Gillespie puts a batch of browsers through to the test to see how well they coped with Cascading Style Sheets layouts. See his results.

By Meryl K. Evans | October 2nd, 2003

CSS Primer

The Bare Bones, No Crap, CSS Text Control Primer, by Wendy Peck. If you've tried looking at one of the many other CSS tutorials but felt like you missed the intro, this may well be the one for you.

By Dori Smith | October 1st, 2003

When is a List Not a List?

When it's a horizontal navigation strip, perhaps? The Listamatic is a collection of examples of real-world CSS adaptations of the unordered list (<ul>) that demonstrate just how powerful the concept of separating presentation from content can be. Want to see a horizontal navigation scheme with rollover effects? Or maybe a more ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 15th, 2003

Paging Media

As many WaSP readers are aware, CSS3 is modularized. Part of the benefit of this is that each module can be worked on independently, placing focus on the development of those options that are proving especially useful without having to revise an entire draft. This week, the W3C announced an update ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 12th, 2003

ReUSEIT Contest

ReUSEIT is a contest for designers and coders to create a redesign of Jakob Nielsen's useit.com that must use valid tableless XHTML 1.0, CSS, and it must meet WAI Accessibility level 1. JavaScript, GIF, JPG and PNG images may be used. Eric Meyer's quote says it all, "Design Eye for ...

By Meryl K. Evans | September 2nd, 2003

New CSS Working Drafts

The W3C Working Groups on Wednesday released three new Working Drafts attached to CSS: the CSS3 Presentation Levels Module, meant to aid creation of outlines and slide presentations; the CSS Print Profile, for printing documents on low-cost hardware; and the CSS3 Syntax Module. Developer comments on these ...

By Ben Henick | August 15th, 2003

Top of the Charts

For those of you who loved Eric Meyer's terrific CSS browser charts and lamented their disappearance upon the shutting down of WebReview's servers, lament no more! Netscape's DevEdge has not only published these much-loved CSS Support Charts on DevEdge, but has done so under a Creative Commons license, ensuring that this ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 11th, 2003

One in the eye for IE

It's official, it's standards-compliant and it doesn't work properly in Internet Explorer on Windows - welcome to the new Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) section at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The message of WaSP since it started has always been 'code to standards, build browsers to standards and everyone will ...

By Ian Lloyd | February 19th, 2003

Gettin’ Stylish

House of Style, which has been around and promoting the positives of CSS for some time, has announced a new mailing list called CSS-Foundations. The list is geared toward those developers and designers just beginning to get their feet wet with CSS. With an emphasis on practical guidance, peer ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 13th, 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