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Buzz Archives: Web Standards (general)

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

Yahoo! Developers: Setting a Standard for the New Professionalism

In an article published Monday, February 13, 2006, Yahoo! Senior Web Developer Nate Koechley outlines the Yahoo! concept of Graded Browser Support. The approach is a work of art so beautiful and sensible it literally made me weep for joy. In light of ongoing discussion regarding a new professionalism for Web ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 14th, 2006

Another Failed Redesign: IEEE

Oh the irony -- that a standards body should ignore standards in creating their new Web site! As a member of the IEEE, I couldn't help but laugh when I saw that the new IEEE Web site redesign was announced in an e-mail newsletter... along with another entry titled "Let's Not ...

By Kimberly Blessing | January 23rd, 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

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

Beyond New Professionalism

In Molly's recent WaSP buzz, Web Standards and The New Professionalism she offers: Today, I want to express that I believe that this new professionalism means taking responsibility for the education of ourselves and each other, and ensuring that reversions like Disney Store UK never happen again. As part of the ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | November 16th, 2005

Web Standards and The New Professionalism

Either you’re with us or against us: you know your craft (or you’re willing to learn) or you don’t. We’re in a process of defining a new professionalism for Web developers and designers.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 15th, 2005

WaSP Microsoft Task Force Update: Upcoming Products, XAML, Acid2, SXSW, and IE7 Revealed

The WaSP Microsoft Task Force held another face-to-face meeting with available members on Tuesday. We met in a Starbucks along the waterfront in rainy Seattle. While the setting might have been a bit predictable, the conversation was unique and at times, very encouraging. WaSPs at the meeting were DL Byron ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 2nd, 2005

Web Essentials 05

The Web Essentials 05 event has made available several audio and slide presentations of last week's keynote (by our own group leader Molly) and sessions at the WE05 PodCasts link. Links to other presentations may also be found listed at the program link. Session topics cover standards, ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | October 4th, 2005

No Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft Will not Win the Web

Reading through an article about Microsoft in Business Week, I was not shocked but oh so enraged by this bit from an interview with CEO Steve Ballmer: “We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 16th, 2005

European Parliament: Nil Point

BBC News reports on the launch of a new site for the European Parliament. With the intention of putting a 'friendlier face' to a parliamentary body who has historically felt very distant to most, if not all, European citizens, you would have thought that only good things can come from ...

By Drew McLellan | September 13th, 2005

Web Standards Are Your Responsibility

In his recent article Web Standards Are Your Responsibility, Keith Robinson makes a convincing argument for sticking to your standards-guns against all odds. I know, probably better than many, how much of a challenge Web standards can be to implement on a day-to-day basis. I've expressed my angst towards standards and ...

By Drew McLellan | September 12th, 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

Disaster Aid for Windows users only?

At Boing Boing yesterday: FEMA to Mac, Linux users: drop dead. Bottom line: if you're not using Windows + IE, it appears that you won't be able to file a disaster assistance claim on Fema.gov. A Javascript enabled browser is another requirement. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | September 7th, 2005

Microsoft Dropping Support for XHTML1.1

Or at least they're dropping support for it in ASP.Net 2.0. Is this a bad thing? The initial reaction might be one of shock and indignation, that it is a step backwards. Another response might be to accept that it's a realistic decision to make and one that actually helps ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 1st, 2005

Comments to U.S. Copyright Office.

Yesterday, Tim Berners Lee (W3C) hand and web delivered formal comments, World Wide Web Consortium Comments on Copyright Office Proposal to Use Single-Vendor Web Service to the United States Copyright Office regarding the proposed preregistration system. At the outset, we would like to stress that nothing in this letter should be ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | August 23rd, 2005

A List Apart Relaunches

Our good friends and colleagues at A List Apart have relaunched with a new design, new structure, and a Rails-based publishing system. Still the same great content, with intelligent commentary and instruction from some of the best in the business, and some of us normal folk too. A List Apart has ...

By Drew McLellan | August 23rd, 2005

It’s a World Wide Web After All

Put on your clogs and dance, because Happy Clog wants you to. Happy Clog, you say? Isn't that Zeldman's design company? No, no my friends. That would be Happy Cog. Happy Clog is the pun-ny name coined for a new standards group emerging in the Netherlands. The ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | August 8th, 2005

Frommelt: Pioneering Web Standards in Higher Ed

One of the common hurdles in converting university and college sites to Web standards is due to a decentralized system of Web development within the organization. Daniel Frommelt is the World Wide Web Coordinator for the University of Wisconsin–Platteville and has been instrumental in converting their Web site to XHTML. However, ...

By Steph Troeth | August 1st, 2005

WaSP Interviews Dr. Vito Evola

The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before. Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He's applying ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 13th, 2005

Hiram College Conversion

A college website, multiple authors, and web standards — how can it be done? The WaSP Education Task Force asked Jonathan Linczak, webmaster and project lead, about the conversion of Hiram College to a standards-compliant website. Jon had been reading about and using standards on sites he had developed before he ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | June 2nd, 2005

Capgemini Goes Valid

Valid, CSS-based redesigns have become almost routine around here, but now and again we see standards making their way into a quarter they haven't previously reached. So it is with the new Capgemini site. While large international consultancies are long on the expertise and experience needed to help megacorps, they're also ...

By Chris Kaminski | May 23rd, 2005

Ten Questions for Joe

Ten Questions for Joe Clark is the latest (May 12, 2005) interview offering by The Web Standards Group. Joe Clark talks about fonts, "more" links, opening new windows, skip links, source order, titles, accessible PDFs, forms, data tables and more. In April, the group interviewed Jason Santa Maria on a variety of ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | May 12th, 2005

Whither Adobe’s SVG Efforts?

What does Adobe's purchase of Macromedia mean for Adobe's SVG efforts? The FAQ (PDF) on the acquisition has this to say:How does this affect Adobe's support of SVG (scalable vector graphics)? Both Adobe and Macromedia have been involved in defining SVG and both were part of the W3C working group that ...

By Chris Kaminski | April 19th, 2005

Adobe, ‘Rich Internet Applications’ and Standards

Adobe's impending purchase of Macromedia has fueled no end of speculation on the fate of now-redundant applications and hand-wringing over the impact of the acquisition on popular Macromedia applications, not to mention the loss of competition in the space. But all that's really a sideshow. The meat of the ...

By Chris Kaminski | April 19th, 2005

Penn State Adopts Policy

News from Pennsylvania State University, New Web Policy to Affect all of Penn State's Public Web Sites, gives a target date of August 15, 2005 for compliance to standards, guidelines, and accessibility. Major changes to the web policy were the result of consultation with the Faculty Senate, Web developers and ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | April 12th, 2005

Happy Anniversary, MACCAWS

April 2, 2005 marks the one year anniversary (our 2004 Buzz) of documents published by the project team at Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards (MACCAWS). The publications are part of a Kit consisting of a standards primer and a technical white paper. These documents are currently available ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | April 7th, 2005

Because the web is only one facet of the Internet

Those of you who don't check Slashdot might be interested in something posted there several minutes ago: A Concise Guide to the Major Internet Bodies. In addition to our favorite, the World Wide Web Consortium, other organizations focused on infrastructure and policy, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and ...

By Ben Henick | March 3rd, 2005

Selling Standards the Sweet Way

If you find yourself having to explain for the umpteenth time to a client why building web pages to web standards is a good thing, you might feel a trifle annoyed. Trifle, you say? Aha, now there's the answer! So, let Andy Clarke explain what his dessert-based ...

By Ian Lloyd | February 23rd, 2005

Two Kinds of Web Developers: Those with Clue…

Joe D'Andrea has produced an informative write-up on the new home page he and Vincent Murphy developed for AT&T. It's pretty, it's elegantly coded, it's valid XHTML Strict. Joe has even added print and handheld media stylesheets. What more could you want?

By Chris Kaminski | February 20th, 2005

…And Those Without

Dan Gillmor, tipped by a post from Robert Scoble, notes the irony of Demo conference award winner Homestead's slogan, "your website company". It seems that Homestead isn't fond of non-Microsoft OSes. The 'official' requirements seem to be Windows and IE4+ or Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x. As a practical matter, their SiteBuilder ...

By Chris Kaminski | February 20th, 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