The Web Standards Project Welcomes New Members, Defines Initiatives for 2003
Released: 14 February 2003 | Author: Molly E. Holzschlag
on behalf of The Web Standards Project
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced today a major personnel and project initiative change.
This week, 17 new member invitees have joined WaSP, while several long-standing
WaSP members have moved from active to emeritus status within the organization.
WaSP Co-founder Steve Champeon explains the group’s changes. “This
time around,” Champeon says, “we’ve gathered together some of
the most dedicated Web standards advocates we could find, people who’ve
done their time in the trenches figuring out how the technologies work and
how to apply them to real-world design and development problems.”
WaSP’s 17 new members are: Douglas Bowman, Chris Casciano, Andrew Clover,
Rick Cecil, Anil Dash, Meryl K. Evans, Matthias Gutfeldt, Chris Kaminski,
Ian Lloyd, Holly Marie Koltz, Anitra Pavka, Anders Pearson, Mark Pilgrim,
April Siegfried, Stephanie Troeth, Thomas Vander Wal, and Jessamyn West.
Among those WaSPs moving to Emeritus status is former Group Leader, Jeffrey
Zeldman. About the project’s new directions, Zeldman points out that, “In
its first years, The Web Standards Project persuaded browser makers to support
markup, presentational, and scripting standards. Over the past two years,”
he goes on to say, “the group has helped thousands of designers and
developers who never gave the matter much thought begin authoring to spec,
validating, and incorporating accessibility in their sites. It also started
working with the makers of authoring tools. Much remains to be done. New
leadership, forging fresh directions, will see that it happens.”
The existing WaSP Steering Committee invited the new members, basing invitations
on individual history of real-world experience, influence and public leadership
covering topic areas including Accessibility, HTML, XHTML, CSS, DOM, and
related technologies as well as advocating better support for these technologies
within Web browsers and development tools. New members represent a range
of important audiences including education, big business, government, and
non-profit organizations.
“The idea is to lead by example,” Champeon continued, “rather
than admonishment, and help people learn how to make use of the power of
Web standards. We hope to expand on the content already available at the
WaSP site, and become a central gathering point for anyone interested in
learning more about the practical side of standards, and not just the world
that awaits us one day. The browser vendors have done a remarkable job in
addressing the needs of developers, and now we’re going to try to make it
even easier for those developers to make use of the tools we now have.”
WaSP members moving to emeritus status are: Eric Costello, Sally Khudairi,
Michael Sweeney, Jeff Veen, and Jeffrey Zeldman.
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This release permanently archived at
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The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.