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Buzz Archives: General

What’s happening with WCAG 2.0?

Following a conversation with Judy Brewer from the W3C back in February, Jared Smith had the chance to interview her and submit some probing questions about what's happening with WCAG 2.0. Thanks Judy...and nice one Jared! See the interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0 in our WaSP Asks the ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 5th, 2007

The Web Standards Documentary Project

Aarron Walter, a faculty member of The Art Institute of Atlanta, launches The Web Standards Documentary Project.

By Rob Dickerson | April 20th, 2007

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) at ALA

WaSP ILG member Martin Kliehm writes about the WAI draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) at A List Apart this week.

By Holly Marie Koltz | April 11th, 2007

Amazon.com to enhance its accessibility

I had to pinch myself to check it's not 1 April yet, because Amazon has always been an invalid, nested-table horror that was a poster-child for inaccessible images, but it seems to be true: Amazon.com, the leading online retailer, and the National Federation of the Blind have entered into a cooperation ...

By Bruce Lawson | March 31st, 2007

WaSP needs you

At the WaSP Annual Meeting at SXSW today, the Web Standards Project announced the WaSP Street Team. Based around the concept of a record company Street Team, the aim is to give you ways to get involved with web standards evangelism in your local area and in the places you ...

By Rachel Andrew | March 12th, 2007

WaSP SXSW Annual Meeting Today

Attend our annual SXSW meeting today! Hear our latest news and updates, ask our member questions, and find out more about a new and interesting project. Panel: WaSP Annual Meeting: Takin' it to the Street Room 8ABC Monday, March 12th 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 12th, 2007

Petition the UK government for accessibility

The newspapers are reporting that the UK government is worried because an online petition on the 10 Downing Street website has more than a million signatures protesting about transport policy. Which reminded me that there's a petition on that site set up by Ian Fenn after the fiasco of the ...

By Bruce Lawson | February 13th, 2007

You’re looking swell, Molly

All of you reading this post will agree with me that even given our chorus of voices, we can't sing enough praises about Molly for her energy and all the work she undertakes in what she strongly believes in. Nor can we match in harmony with her gift to communicate, ...

By Steph Troeth | January 30th, 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

The Dutch Embrace Web Standards

According to Peter-Paul Koch the new Dutch accessibility laws are pretty sweeping and "go way beyond WCAG". Better yet, they read like a veritable blueprint for modern standards based web development: A few examples will show you where Dutch government accessibility is heading. As of 1 September last year, every website ...

By Dean Edwards | January 15th, 2007

Reducing the pain of adopting a JavaScript library

Why is it so difficult to adopt a new JavaScript library? Chris Heilmann offers library developers a path for improvement.

By Mike Davies | December 12th, 2006

Video Presentation: Douglas Crockford on the “Theory of the DOM”

Douglas Crockford, discoverer of JSON and JavaScript evangelist/veteran has given a training on the theory of the DOM lately and the videos are available on the web. The course takes you through the theory of the DOM, how browsers implement it and what the problems with the DOM and the ...

By Christian Heilmann | October 18th, 2006

Microformats for cheats

Get the skinny on Microformats with this handy little cheat sheet.

By Ian Lloyd | September 27th, 2006

Advocacy in Education

Hailing from Sweden, Lars Gunther, (relatively unknown to the Web guru world), takes on a sizable challenge and project to educate and advocate Web standards and curriculum change in his country’s educational system.

By Rob Dickerson | September 26th, 2006

Event Handling versus Event Delegation

It is not new, but it still is rather clever: In order to avoid having to add event handlers to each and every element you want to monitor, you can use one single handler on a parent element and let browser event bubbling do the rest of the work for ...

By Christian Heilmann | September 24th, 2006

Target sighted – a hit but not quite a bullseye

The accessibility case against Target.com moves on to a new stage just when Target had really hoped it would actually be dropped. Bad news for the company, perhaps, but is it all good news for web accessibility advocates as some have read it to be?

By Ian Lloyd | September 14th, 2006

Accessibility Webcast on Plone

Many developers in the education field are moving to open source content management software solutions for a variety of reasons, including: better standards/accessibility support, and a growing community and network of resources and help. The National Center on Disability & Access to Education recently hosted a webcast case study of one such solution, Plone.

By Holly Marie Koltz | September 2nd, 2006

Back to School, Back to Reality

As a student of Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Dallas, Texas, Blake Elshire learned CSS as part of his course, then discovered that not all students were quite as charmed by the technology as he was. He shares his thoughts and insights with WaSP EduTF.

By Rob Dickerson | August 28th, 2006

IE7: The List is In

A comprehensive list of bug fixes, implementations and developer/designer resources for IE7 has been published by Markus Mielke of Microsoft (and also a member of the W3C CSS Working Group) on the IEBlog today.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | August 22nd, 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

Safari for Windows?

Swift is a new open source browser based on Apple's WebCore & JavaScriptCore rendering and JavaScript engines. Warning: it's marked as 1.0pre alpha, and it is very much an alpha: very rough-looking UI, no scrollwheel support, pathetic form controls and I've had reports from colleagues that some folks can't even get ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 9th, 2006

Check out IconFactory.com

Over the last week we've been noticing the short teaser movies at Iconfactory.com. We could tell that something was up, but we weren't sure quite what. Now, it's official: they've redesigned, and it not only looks great, it's also standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. To the folks at IconFactory: great job, and ...

By Dori Smith | August 3rd, 2006

Firefox Security Update

Firefox has issued an update for its browser across all platforms to improve security and stability.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 28th, 2006

Misplaced Anger: A Rebuttal to Zeldman’s Criticism of the W3C

There’s been discussion in the community about unrest at the W3C. This isn’t exactly news to most, particularly if you’ve been following the WCAG 2.0 saga. This time, however, the criticism comes from a strong voice, none other than Jeffrey Zeldman.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 26th, 2006

Acid2 and Opera 9 Clarifications: Yes, Opera 9 Passes the Test

There’s been a bit of confusion over the Acid2 test and Opera 9 results. Ian Hickson has provided WaSP with the following clarifications about the Acid2 test and how things should behave. Hopefully, this insight will serve to clarify why some people are reporting issues in Opera 9 compliance.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 20th, 2006

Maintainable JavaScript

The Web Standards Group (not to be confused with the Web Standards Project) is a grassroots organisation based in Australia dedicated to promoting web standards and accessibility. The organisation's activities have now spread to the other side of the world. The first Web Standards Group event in London was held last ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 18th, 2006

Firefox 2 Beta 1: Live Today

Within minutes of this post being published, Mozilla will be rolling out the Firefox 2 Beta 1 release. This is a developer preview release of Firefox, and includes a number of interface and technology implementations, changes and upgrades.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 12th, 2006

Talking about JavaScript in London

JavaScript was just one of the items on the menu at this year's @media conference in London. The panel on JavaScript libraries featured Simon Willison, Stuart Langridge, Peter-Paul Koch, Dan Webb and the host with the most, Cameron Adams. It was a highly entertaining romp through the pros and cons ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 3rd, 2006

PAS78 available free of charge

The British Standards Institution's Publicly Available Specification "Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites" is now available free of charge and for nothing from the Disability Rights Commission. Yay!

By Bruce Lawson | June 29th, 2006

London Web Standards Group meeting 14th of July

See Andy Budd and Christian Heilmann talk about “Maintainable JavaScript” and “Who cares about Standards” respectively on 14th of July in London. Cheap as Chips and a good networking opportunity to boot!

By Mike Davies | June 8th, 2006

BrowseAloud respond

Many thanks to Martin McKay, Technical Director and one of the founders of Texthelp (developers of BrowseAloud), for responding to my previous post All aboard the PAS 78 gravy train. In a refreshingly sincere and straightforward email Martin reassured me of his personal commitment to the cause of accessibility and literacy. ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 27th, 2006

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