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Buzz Archives: General

WCAG review period extended

The comment period for WCAG 2 has been extended to Thursday, June 22. If you are thinking about giving feedback, I suggest reading the directions for commenters. The ATF will be publishing a broader set of issues shortly, and working to help the WCAG Working Group cover narrower technical issues as ...

By Matt May | May 26th, 2006

On Quality Education

“What college or university has a good program for Web Development (or Design)?” is a question frequently encountered on mailing lists, in forums, or in conversations with others. Many would like to know the answer.

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 24th, 2006

Educating Web Professionals

José Trudel instructs students with a focus on emerging technologies, standards, and skills; providing a strong foundation needed for today’s web professional.

By Rob Dickerson | May 22nd, 2006

Microsoft Expression Preview Release

Set to debut in June of 2006 Microsoft has publically released a free trial preview of its newest web authoring tool, Microsoft Expression Web Designer.

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 15th, 2006

Adobe’s Spry Framework for AJAX

Adobe Labs Spry Framework for AJAX – friendly to use, but poor support for standards.

By Drew McLellan | May 12th, 2006

Yes, We Have the Power

Chris Wilson of Microsoft swears to live by the standards sword – or end his relationship if Microsoft doesn’t stay true to the standards course.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 11th, 2006

All aboard the PAS 78 gravy train

With the extensive media coverage following its launch, a large number of businesses, education establishments and government agencies with a stake in the UK online market should be aware of PAS 78 - Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites. Partly due to the cost associated with this document, ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 11th, 2006

Even Scoble Says Nay Nay

No, this isn't a comedy routine with the fabulous John Pinette taking the stage. It's part of an ongoing tragic saga of Web sites that are browser-specific. Nothing new there, as we all know. In this case, they're all Microsoft sites, alas, and even Robert Scoble is just saying no. While ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 8th, 2006

Accessibility and UK small businesses

Take a look at the latest study coming out of the United Kingdom examining the attitudes and perceptions of small business toward accessibility.

By Derek Featherstone | April 29th, 2006

The WaSP Café

Kazuhito Kidachi, the WaSP liaison in Japan, has started a new series of events dubbed the "WaSP Café". It is a social gathering where people can chat about web standards and related topics while drinking a nice cup of coffee. As Kazuhito says, "Why coffee? Because to talk seriously, it's ...

By Faruk Ateş | April 25th, 2006

WaSP International Liaison Group

With a growing interest around the world in Web standards, international relationships are becoming key. WaSP is seeking to create an International Liaison Group for the sharing of Web standards related information worldwide.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 18th, 2006

Notre Dame Web Group

Lead Web developer Steve Smith and the University of Notre Dame Web Group tackle web standards and accessibility in original and exciting ways.

By Holly Marie Koltz | April 12th, 2006

Government Web Site Failure – Is It So Shocking?

Report reveals poor pass rates for standards in UK government web sites.

By Ian Lloyd | March 31st, 2006

Microformat Extensions for Dreamweaver

As part of our remit to encourage the use of web standards amongst the Dreamweaver community, the DWTF has produced a suite of extensions to help make working with Microformats easy.

By Drew McLellan | March 30th, 2006

Acid2 Supported in Opera One Year Later

Opera 9 passes Acid2, next step for Opera is mobile, and preliminary mumblings about Acid3 have begun.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 28th, 2006

IE 7 Beta Preview 2 Out Now

Microsoft announce release of IE 7 beta 2 after which no more CSS fixes will be addressed – this is as far as it goes for version 7.

By Ian Lloyd | March 21st, 2006

Kudos to Michigan State

Michigan State University launched a redesign of its Web site, yesterday. Designed and developed with best practices that follow Web Standards and Web Accessibiity, the university Web site looks good and validates to the XHTML strict doctype. The redesign involved the teamwork of the MSU Libraries, Computing, and ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | February 28th, 2006

Failed Redesigns

Joe Clark recently wrote about several Failed Redesigns. His post has such a classic WaSP tone, that I hope he doesn't mind that I quote a couple of paragraphs here. A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that ...

By Tantek Çelik | January 9th, 2006

24 Ways to Impress Your Friends

It's an online advent calender, and behind each door* you'll find a web development tip/tutorial (all standards-based goodness, of course) to impress your friends with - 24 of them, to be precise. I'd prefer that to a piece of chocolate any day. 24 ways to impress your friends kicks off ...

By Ian Lloyd | December 1st, 2005

Mehr Presse

Jo Bager has written a short-but-oh-so-sweet blurb on our humble Task force for Heise Online. Vielen Dank, Herr Bager!

By Chris Kaminski | July 19th, 2005

Presentation Slides with DOM and CSS

Eric Meyer’s S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations. My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as Eric’s system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides.

By Christian Heilmann | July 18th, 2005

WaSP ATF: Already A Smoking Gun?

It's not even two days since WaSP announced the formation of the Accessibility Task Force, quickly coined the “ATF” by several folks despite a more sobering U.S. federal agency that goes by the same initialism (or would that be acronym?). While clearly a long time coming, the immediacy and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 25th, 2005

Welcome, Tantek

The WaSP would like to officially welcome Tantek Çelik to its Steering Committee (pssst, someone update the bio page thanks for the quick work, Ben). I was wondering why I was reading about it here and here but not on this site, and then I realized that it's probably because ...

By Dori Smith | March 12th, 2005

QuirksMode Bug Reports

This is very useful: QuirksMode Bug Reports, "entirely dedicated to finding, mending, and publishing CSS and JavaScript browser bugs." You can search by browser or by keyword, or just go to that page to see the last seven reported bugs.

By Dori Smith | November 23rd, 2004

One of the common complaints about building Web applications (either client-side or those that use both client and server as platforms for development) is the difficulty that comes along with debugging them. In the cover story in this month's New Architect, this correspondent discusses some tips for managing the debugging ...

By Steven Champeon | August 2nd, 2002

Ars Technica Reviews Mozilla

Ars Technica has released a detailed review of Mozilla, not just from the perspective of whether it is good enough to make you finally switch to a browser that understands and supports Web standards, but also discusses whether it is a success as a product of their original mission. Contains ...

By Steven Champeon | August 2nd, 2002

Amaya Updated

The W3C web editor/browser Amaya has been updated. Version 6.2 increases support for CSS, XHTML, SVG, and MathML. Amaya is not a commercial browser like IE, Navigator, Opera, et al. W3C members use it to demonstrate and test new developments in web protocols and data formats. W3C Jigsaw plays a ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | July 10th, 2002

a few valid points

news.com misses the point

By Steven Champeon | July 8th, 2002

New Web standards education and outreach forum

W3C is starting a new discussion list, the Web standards education and outreach forum, for Web standards evangelists, authors, and others to discuss ways to improve the quality of web-standards related books, publications, lectures and training courses. Hope to see you there! hat tip: Eric Meyer

By Shirley Kaiser | July 5th, 2002

PALM GOOD, OMNIWEB NOT SO

Today’s Daily Report includes a dreamy screen capture of The WaSP’s site on a Palm Pilot and a doleful one as viewed in the new release of OmniWeb. Includes writeup.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | June 25th, 2002

And here I thought they were real people

Mark Pilgrim's been telling stories about Web accessibility at his shiny xhtml 1.1 blog all this week, and plans to keep it up. You'd think that sites like www.section508.gov would be half as conscientious as Mark about such matters, but no.

By Todd Fahrner | June 14th, 2002

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