Buzz Archives for December 2002
Happy New Year!
Philosopher Bertrand Russell said that "War does not determine who is right - only who is left." For web designers and developers, it's been browser wars that have made our lives very difficult. In some ways, those difficulties have sent less committed web creators running into the night. Those of us ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Announcement
- Counting Down One More Time On W3C Patent Policy
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Tomorrow is the deadline for the Call For Comments phase of the latest World Wide Web Consortium Patent Policy Working Draft. Needless to say, this version - based on royalty-free licensing - is perceived as more agreeable than its predecessor, which was based on a reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing model.
By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Dear Web Developers: Browser Sniffing is Stupid
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...especially if you do it poorly, basing decisions on user agent strings and assumed capabilities, rather than on actual capabilities. Two alert readers sent in sad examples of this in action just this week. First, the recently redesigned HotBot, which does make a tremendous effort to support standards and provide ...
By Steven Champeon | Filed in Browsers
- The Lifecycle of Accessibility
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evolt has just published a fine article by Italian Web developer Antonio Volpon, discussing the lifecycle of Web accessibility, a refreshing change from the simplistic advice to just add alt attributes to your images. Volpon talks about the phases all Web sites go through, and in the tradition of Mark ...
By Steven Champeon | Filed in Accessibility
- Is there a draft in here?
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The third XHTML 2.0 Working Draft was published yesterday. It is largely a corrective release, fixing some problems that were introduced in the second Working Draft, which was made public last week. As the W3C points out, XHTML 2.0 is a relative of the Web's familiar publishing languages, HTML 4 and ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in HTML/XHTML, W3C/Standards Documentation
- Opening Day
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Opera Software's "Open the Web" project asks Opera users to contact the owners of sites that fail in their browser or deny them entrance. "Let them know you would like to see the site work with all browsers, including Opera." If you're developing a site and are considering refusing access ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Browsers
- Getting the Last Word
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Web standards gets the last word in an article written by Grant Butler for Globe Technology News. While best for those readers with a general rather than deep awareness of web standards, the article, All Browser Code Not Created Equal, is noteworthy because it explains in easy terms some ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- WaSP Asks the W3C
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In an effort to assist developers and designers in understanding detailed issues when working with web standards, WaSP and the W3C kick off a new project today. The project, "WaSP Asks the W3C" involves WaSP Steering Committee members culling questions from supporters and asking members of the W3C's Quality Assurance ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in WaSP Asks the W3C
- W3C Does CSS
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With its newly redesigned home page, the W3C tossed any remaining table layouts out the window and committed completely to CSS for page layout. The new home page is in general written for newer, standards-compliant user agents in XHTML 1.0 strict. Check out the W3C's updated look.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in CSS
- Take Two
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Mozilla 1.2.1 was released yesterday. This version addresses a bug introduced in the 1.2 release that, among other things, was causing problems for sites using document.write() calls to generate page content.
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Browsers
- Another Hall-of-Shame Entry
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Check out Aventis - but only if you're running IE6 or Netscape 7. Their challenge, they say is life; on the evidence the challenges include basic standards citizenship. On a sidenote, once you do get into this site, the baroque menu structure is a good argument for some of the ...
By Tim Bray | Filed in Web Standards (general)
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
Small Business Update
By Aaron Gustafson | August 5th, 2010
A while back I announced WaSP’s new small business outreach effort and, thanks to your help, we’ve been making great progress.
Back in February, I announced that one of WaSP’s new efforts was going to be in the direction of outreach to small businesses. Since that time, things have looked pretty quiet from the outside, but the Small Business Outreach Committee has actually been quite busy gathering materials and putting together our first document which aims to help small business owners evaluate the competencies of those seeking to do web work for them.
Thanks to the efforts of a handful of WaSP members and a cadre of other web professionals, we’re making great progress. We’ve just wrapped up the material organization phase and are beginning to work on drafting the document, which we hope to have out before the end of the year. We’re also in the process of putting together a website to house “living” versions of the materials we produce and assist with the promotion and distribution of this document and any others we generate in the future.
We’ll post further announcements on this project as we get closer to the launch date.
Filed in Education, Outreach, Small Business Outreach | Comments (0)