Buzz Archives for June 2002
Dynamic XHTML Competition
Are web standards boring? Eddie Traversa thinks not. He’s launched a standards-based Dynamic XHTML Design Competition. First prize: $1,000. Good luck and happy coding.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- PALM GOOD, OMNIWEB NOT SO
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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 | Filed in General
- HWG Offers Accessibility Course Online
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Taught by Kynn and Liz Bartlett, the HWG/IWA is once again offering their popular Accessible Web Design online course, beginning July 15th. Kynn is a longtime accessibility advocate, past president of the HWG, and author of the upcoming new book, Sams Teach Yourself Cascading Style Sheets in 24 Hours.
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Training
- For Love of Bobby
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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 | Filed in Validation
- And here I thought they were real people
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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 | Filed in General
- Cutting Edge CSS
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CSS guru Eric Meyer has added a new css/edge demo, Pure CSS Menus, to his experimental CSS site. Eric created this new CSS popout menu with standards in mind. Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 7.0 support the CSS used for the popout menus so be sure to use one of those ...
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in CSS
- London Calling
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UK gov’t draft guidelines propose that all British government sites adopt web standards. Recommendations include: use HTML to structure the document, not style it; use CSS for layout; don’t use browser-specific scripting methods; validate against a DOCTYPE; and others that help ensure accessibility. Cheerio! (Hat tip: Matthew Farrand.)
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General
- We get mail
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This just in: "Congrats on the WaSP relaunch, BTW. I'm sure you'll be happy to hear that the site looks bloody brilliant in my wireless Palm browser." Do things right and reap the rewards.
- Show us your CSS!
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Tim Roberts of wiseguysonly.com is sponsoring a CSS competition in which one lucky winner will receive a domain name and 20MB of free PHP hosting for one year. The top 5 entries will be used as alternate switchable stylesheets for the site. Check out the contest entry rules and make ...
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in CSS
- Web Accessibility and Educational Technology
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This month's Educational Technology Review from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) covers technology and accessibility. The offerings include two articles discussing policy and legislation pertaining to Web accessibility compliance by educational institutions. Hat tip to Kathy Cahill from the MIT Adaptive Technology (ATIC) Lab for pointing ...
By B.K. DeLong | Filed in General
- New Interview of Eric Meyer at Digital Web
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Meryl Evans interviews Eric Meyer, well known CSS guru and author, for this week's Digital Web. Eric is also the Standards Evangelist for Netscape and list chaperone for the css-discuss list. Find out what he thinks about standards, CSS, using tables, accessibility, future possibilities, and even his weekly radio show. See ...
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Welcome back
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Smooches to the true believers who flooded The WaSP’s in-box this a.m. In the interest of efficiency: the old Browser Upgrade campaign has been redirected to its new home here, an earlier problem with the RSS feed has been fixed, and we’re cognizant of a horizontal scrollbar in IE5.x/Mac that ...
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General
- Kudos from WebReference
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Thanks to Andy King, yesterday's WebReference Update gave WaSP a terrific write-up that also describes some of what you'll find at the new site, including our new Learn section.
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in General
- It Lives!
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The Web Standards Project, Phase II
By Steven Champeon | Filed in General
- Connecticut to Enforce Accessibility Guidelines
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According to an article from Government Technology magazine posted in late May, the State of Connnecticut will require consultants, within the state's Department of Information Technology, to take Web accessibility training in accordance with state guidelines - hopefully more states will follow suit. A shout-out and kudos to Accessibility Maven Cynthia ...
By B.K. DeLong | Filed in Accessibility
- SVG: The Future Is Now
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Today the O'Reilly Network features SVG On The Rise, a thoughtful article on the strengths of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a standards-based alternative to Flash. Be sure to read the section entitled “Why SVG fits into the Web.”
By Scott Andrew LePera | Filed in General
- It’s Spring
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The garden has masses of flowers, the tank tops have come out of storage, and the other day, I was walking a friend through some excellent, beautifully-done, just-created pages over the phone, and we weren’t seeing the same things. “Oh, she said, in an embarrassed tone. It’s just stupid old ...
By WaSP Member | Filed in Opinion
- Web Accessibility in the NYT
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Sarah Horton, a principal for the Curricular Computing division of Dartmouth College's department of Academic Computing and co-author of the famed Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide (which I happened to be my religious text when I first started developing websites) has an excellent editorial in today's New York Times ...
By B.K. DeLong | Filed in Accessibility
- Text Sizing Woes
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WaSP Owen Briggs has posted 264 screenshots demonstrating text sizing problems and failures across IE, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape. Executive Summary: When trying to make text accessible, even the workarounds to the workarounds fail in some of our best browsers.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in General
- TopStyle Pro 3 Beta Released
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Top Style CSS Editor is morphing into a fully integrated CSS/ HTML/XHTML Editor for Windows. Supporting standards since its 1999 inception, this new version will help even more with creating standards-compliant markup for your site. You can download the Pro 3 Beta 3 now (for free) and give it a ...
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in Authoring Tools
- Mispaint
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One community of web users that you probably don't know about unless you're one of them is the home-improvement culture. Improving your home is tremendously reference-intensive: you're always looking up mildew-resistant paint or miter saw kerf tolerances or lag bolt length tables, and the Web is a boon. Everybody paints, ...
By B.K. DeLong | Filed in General
- Hot from the oven
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Moz, Chimera, standards, beauty
- CSS Promise vs. Reality: How Do They Compare?
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Mark Newhouse addresses this question in his new article at Digital Web, Cascading Style Sheets, Promise vs. Reality, and a Look to the Future. Mark covers many important areas, including tables vs. CSS layouts, separating style and content, visual control, accessibility, leaner markup, forward compatibility, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, site ...
By Shirley Kaiser | Filed in CSS
- W3C Quality Assurance
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Want to get involved in helping promote the quality of W3C process and work? The W3C Quality Assurance (QA) working group's goals include planning and process; better, more testable specifications; coordination with internal and external groups; and building and acquiring conformance test materials. For more information on Quality Assurance at the ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation
- Mozilla and CSS1, bound at the hip
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Don’t you wish everyone did this? The Mozilla Project has published a copy of the CSS1 Recommendation cross-referenced to the remaining bugs in their implementation of same.
By Steven Champeon | Filed in Browsers
- Style Master 2.2
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Version 2.2 of Style Master for Windows and Macintosh has left the building. A WYSIWYG tool for CSS design, Style Master can help you get up to speed on the web's standard layout language. Style Master 2.2 supports all of CSS2, as well as the new CSS3 mobile profile.
By Jeffrey Zeldman | Filed in Authoring Tools
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
A New Direction and a New Project
By Aaron Gustafson | February 2nd, 2010
In an effort to increase adoption of web standards, we’re going to try something new.
A lot of you are probably wondering where the WaSP of the late ’90s or even the early ’00s has gone. Where are the actions? Where is the advocacy? Who should we be mad at today?
The truth is that this organization is evolving. For the last two years, a large amount of our focus has been placed on education, realized in our creation of the InterAct curriculum framework and the birth of the Open Web Education Alliance. With the lion’s share of our talent and energy devoted to these efforts, things have been noticeably quiet on this blog, but that’s not an excuse…we can and should be doing more to promote the understanding and use of web standards. After all that’s what we were formed to do.
For the last two or three years, WaSP’s relevance has definitely diminished. With a few exceptions, browsers are doing a darn good job of promoting standards. Techniques we championed, such as Unobtrusive JavaScript and Progressive Enhancement, have become engrained in the methodology of many great web agencies and in-house web teams. In many ways, it seems WaSP has won the war for web standards, but has it really? There are still a ton of small web companies and small to mid-sized businesses building websites with little or no regard for cross-browser /cross-device compatibility. Inaccessible sites and applications, especially in this age of Ajax, seem to pop up every few seconds.
These projects have been put together by web designers and developers we’ve never reached and, for the last few years, we’ve been trying to figure out how to change that. Sure, our education effort is a logical means of teaching the next generation of web designers and developers to do things the Right Way™, but what of the practicing professionals who either have not been exposed to web standards or have been reluctant to upgrade their skill set? How do we reach them?
One way we hope to move this group in the right direction is by doing an end-run around them in reaching out to small businesses.
Small businesses drive our national economies and are responsible for millions of websites worldwide. Of course, most small businesses don’t know (or even want to know) about the technical aspects of web standards, but they do want to know what will save them money and help them run their businesses more efficiently.
As the first project in our small business outreach effort, WaSP will be developing a resource to be used when interviewing individuals and teams to do web work. The focus of this effort will be a series of questions that, when asked of applicants, will help a small business determine whether or not they have the skills necessary to build a modern website. Each question be coupled with background on the associated topic that outlines why it is important and tips for determining how well the question was answered.
Our goals for this project are two-fold:
- To support small businesses by protecting them from bad developers and making sure they get the best websites possible; and
- To expose individual designers and small web shops to web standards when they go out to bid on projects in hopes that they will choose to upgrading their skills in order to continue getting work.
In order to make this project a success, we need your help. Whether you are interested in helping us collect and organize the content or are keen to promote the resource once it’s complete, we want you to be involved. If you can lend a hand, please say so in a comment on this message and I will be in touch at the beginning of next week.
Filed in Education, Outreach, Training, WaSP Announcement | Comments (38)