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Buzz Archives for February 2005

Staples.com CSS redesign

Update: Apparently, we BUZZed too soon; it appears that Staples has rolled back their site to its previous design. Hopefully this is a temporary hiccup, and Staples will soon be CSS-licious yet again. Following on the heels of its standards-savvy redesign of their customer rewards center, Staples.com has just launched ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS

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 | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Inclusive Design?

Now, the Disasters Emergency Committee web site is not exactly a textbook example of good standards-based design, but apparently it will allow users with Lynx running on Sun Solaris to access the site and make donations (just turn a very blind eye to the nasty markup). It's a shame, though, ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Bizarre

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 | Filed in Web Standards (general)

…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 | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Bad Form

There's an interesting article over at ZDNet about the future of forms on the web. Is the way forward Xforms? Or is Web Forms 2.0 the way forward? Or are we gonna find ourselves having to deal with both? Read the article and decide for yourself whether this is a ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general)

CSS Hacks – A Timely Reminder

With the news of IE7 somewhere on the horizon, there's something that all web developers should be aware of if - and it's a big if, I believe - Microsoft does take the opportunity of updating and fixing the CSS rendering problems with their browser. As Anne van Kesteren points ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Browsers, CSS

There’s Nothing Mystical about Standards

Vincent Flanders writes on his Web Pages That Suck site that one of the biggest web mistakes of 2004 (actually, number three in the list) is the 'mystical belief in the power of web standards, usability, and tableless CSS'. He writes: There is nothing wrong with any of ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Web Standards (general)

Celebrating Serious Bandwidth

25 million downloads is a very respectable figure by anyone's standards, and standards are what we know and love here. That's the figure for Firefox downloads since version 1.0 was released 99 days ago, and Spreadfirefox is celebrating/commemorating the milestone with some very limited edition Firefox coins. Personally, I'm over the ...

By Ian Lloyd | Filed in Browsers, Web Standards (general)

Standalone IE To Be Released This Summer

While details are still scant, Microsoft today announced that it will be releasing a standalone version of Internet Explorer this summer. This is a drastic reversal of Microsoft’s stated intention to cease developing IE as a standalone product—and one that will have standards advocates biting their fingernails with trepidation. ...

By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Browsers

Hakon Gets Hot

Hakon gets hot and tells Bill Gates what's what about interoperability. The article, Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates must be read by every web developer and standards geek. Now.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Browsers

MSN Gets Religion

WaSP Advisory Committee member Douglas Bowman has some nice things to say about MSN's new CSS-based look. And why not? While the XHTML Strict DOCTYPE is a bit optimistic, they come closer to achieving it than many high-profile sites. Quibbles or no, clearly someone on the MSN team 'gets it'.

By Chris Kaminski | Filed in CSS, Web Standards (general)

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