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Buzz Archives: Validation

Support the W3C Validators

The W3C has launched a donation and sponsorship program to support the free validators provided by the organization. Give today!

By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 2008

WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed recommendations

WCAG 2 and the mobileOK Basic Tests specifications have been moved to "proposed recommendation status" by the W3C, which means that the technical material is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. WCAG 2 Shawn Henry writes of WCAG 2, Over the last few months, the Web Content ...

By Bruce Lawson | November 4th, 2008

A review of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, May 2007 Working Draft

In last month's Interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0, we read that:WCAG 2.0 went through several Public Working Drafts in recent years, and a Last Call Working Draft in 2006. Each Working Draft was sent out for public review — altogether to hundreds of individuals, organizations, and lists around ...

By Patrick Lauke | June 11th, 2007

Feeling validated

The W3C validator is a great tool. It allows developers to quickly and easily find and fix the inevitable problems that creep into any markup document. As well as the quick'n'easy version, the advanced interface allows you to get a more verbose output. Until recently, one of the options was to ...

By Jeremy Keith | October 31st, 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

Flash, JavaScript, and web standards: like sodium and water?

As expected, Flash and such are proven a controversial topic.

By Ben Henick | August 17th, 2006

Valid Flash, video, and audio embed (object) markup

The following three links need to be in one place, once and for all: Valid Flash <object> markup: “Flash Satay” by Drew McLellan Valid video <object> markup: “Bye Bye Embed” by Elizabeth Castro Valid audio <object> markup (with Quicktime): “Object Embedding” by Simon Jessey, et. al. Here's the backstory: Eighteen months ago, I ...

By Ben Henick | August 15th, 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

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

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

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

Validation, meet Unit Testing. Unit Testing, meet Validation.

Are you "test infected"? Do you work on dynamic sites and wish there was an automated way to run the output through the W3C validator? Do you wish it was integrated nicely with your unit testing framework? Scott Raymond has come up with a nice bit of code to add automated ...

By Anders Pearson | September 20th, 2005

Searching for Standards

I did a small comparative analysis of markup practices at several major search engines. It's interesting to note that only one engine is using valid markup and CSS layouts, and that would be MSN. Close behind is AOL, whose validation problems are mostly related to ampersands not being escaped, and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 8th, 2005

All That Glitters

Mike Davidson, art director behind the now-legendary ESPN.com CSS redesign, announces the redesign of ABC News, touting it as a success of real-world web standards. While the site’s new design successfully incorporates Flash, JavaScript, and CSS into an appealing, well-reasoned layout, I’m not exactly sure what real-world web standards means. ...

By Ethan Marcotte | October 12th, 2004

Embedding Objects the Valid Way

As part of his piece on best practices for online captioning, Joe Clark has also published a compendium of techniques for using <embed> and <object> with valid markup. This one's going in the bookmarks for sure.

By Chris Kaminski | September 9th, 2004

Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE/Win

Chris Pederick's outstanding Web Developer Toolbar has long been a must-have tool for web developers & designers using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Now, webheads who're still using IE for Windows (yes, there really are some, and they deserve our pity ;-) have a comparable tool: the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Much ...

By Chris Kaminski | August 13th, 2004

W3C Log Validator updated

A new version of the W3C Log Validator was announced by Olivier Thereaux yesterday on the W3C's validator mailing list. The new version (v 0.3) has added features, bug fixes, and two new modules - CSS Validation and an experimental survey module. Do you need to convert a large web site ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | June 9th, 2004

Webby Award Validation Woes

If content is king then valid pages must be the poor suckers down in the dungeon. The Webby winners were announced today, and while certainly some of the most content-rich, culturally valuable, and technically helpful sites are on the roster of winners, there is only one valid home page among ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 12th, 2004

Markup Validator Upgrade

Announced today, the W3C has released a big upgrade to their popular markup validation service: (The new release) features new documentation and navigation, and offers helpful explanations and recovery mechanisms instead of fatal errors. To the unpaid volunteers who maintain our trusty steed, a big round of thanks and praise for making ...

By Dave Shea | May 7th, 2004

Code As I Say, Not As I Do

The World Wide Web Conference is entering its thirteenth year, preparing for yet another round of action-packed W3-related developer events and presentations. Funny thing, though: their site's woefully invalid, inaccessible, and well nigh unusable. Littered with alt-bereft images and deprecated HTML, one wonders just how such a self-described prestigious series ...

By Ethan Marcotte | March 11th, 2004

XForms Validation

The XForms Institute announced the launch of its new Web service, currently in beta: Free Online XForms Validation. The site also hosts interactive XForms tutorials and content from the O'Reilly book, XForms Essentials authored by Micah Dubinko. The online service validates XForms documents by URL, file upload and text area input ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | February 23rd, 2004

Passing Validation Muster

Whew. We passed the XHTML validation test that Keith randomly conducted. He makes a few good points about how hard it is to stay valid. When validating a page, you fix the errors encountered. Who is to say tomorrow it will validate when you slip in your blog entry or ...

By Meryl K. Evans | February 18th, 2004

I can’t help but wonder…

I can't help but wonder whether Jason would have better luck defending his position if he used standards-compliant markup (foxtrot comic of 2003.11.05 no longer available at http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/ ).

By Mark Pilgrim | November 15th, 2003

Validation just got better

Much clearer error explanations and a new "fussy parsing" mode are the major new features of the latest W3C Validator Beta release:“The big news in this version is internal support for custom and customizeable error explanations. This means an end to digging all over the net drying to figure out ...

By Matthias Gutfeldt | August 28th, 2003

Check one… Check two… Sibilance

The Checky project has released version 1.5 of their great little validation add-on for Mozilla, Phoenix/Firebird, Beonex and Netscape. New in this version is the ability to check files on your local filesystem with the services that accept file uploads, like the W3C's markup and CSS validators. Other additions since the ...

By Porter Glendinning | April 29th, 2003

Tools And Views You Can Truly Use

A couple o' cool tools are now available—the kind you really want because you'll actually use them. What's more, they're free. First up is LogValidator, a new utility from the W3C that works using your server's logs. It validates the most frequently visited pages allowing you to clean up your high-traffic ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 16th, 2003

Check, please!

For you Mozilla users out there: The current Project of the Week over at mozdev.org is Checky, a great little add-on that makes validating your pages so easy you'll have no excuse not to. Checky adds a submenu to Mozilla's context menu that allows you to run whatever page you're ...

By Porter Glendinning | January 9th, 2003

Upgrades to W3C Validator Are Now Live

The W3C Validation Service today released several improvements to their software. More information on the upgrade can be found at the validator's What's New page.

By Ben Henick | November 26th, 2002

New W3C HTML Validator

The W3C has announced a beta version of their HTML Validator, with support for a long and varied list of XML and XHTML related markup, including SVG, MathML and the MIME type application/xhtml+xml. Go bang on it and let them know what you find wrong (or right!) with the new ...

By Steven Champeon | October 23rd, 2002

For Love of Bobby

Cast.org’s Bobby (no longer online) does an ace job of checking your site for compliance with the WAI and Section 508 accessibility standards. Not only that, the service is free. So what could be bad? Well, what’s bad is that Bobby itself uses invalid markup, and the URLs it generates to ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | June 17th, 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)

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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