Buzz Archives for March 2004
Opera, IBM voice
ZDNet this week, offers up news where Standards meets Accessibility and Emerging technology with “Opera's browser finds its voice,” by Matt Loney and Paul Festa. Opera is adding voice control to its browser, enabling users to browse the Web and fill in voice-enabled Web forms by talking to their PC. ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility, Browsers, HTML/XHTML, Web Standards (general)
- Are you X7.45 compliant?
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The folks at no-http.org would like to see the ubiquitous 'http:' removed from the beginning of all our URLs. So instead of linking to "http://example.com/" in your pages, you would link to just "//example.com/". This is actually quite legal. RFC 1808 specifies that URLs beginning with '//' should just inherit ...
By Anders Pearson | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- What’s the point… an over-emphasis on technique?
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Jason Fried of 37Signals suggests gingerly that too much attention is being paid to the minute details of Web site implementation, and in doing so he rang an alarm bell loudly enough to distract me from severe personal distress. He explained, as part of a SXSW Interactive recap: “I’d like ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Usability
- A Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev
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Read it, read it again. Save it. Print it. Highlight key points. (there are many) The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev by Heidi Pollock (webmonkey, 5 Mar 2004)It takes one gigantabig tutorial to teach you how to build sites for all those itty, bitty devices.One of the better pieces (I have encountered) that ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Design, Mobile, Usability, Web Standards (general)
- Code As I Say, Not As I Do
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The World Wide Web Conference is entering its thirteenth year, preparing for yet another round of action-packed W3-related developer events and presentations. Funny thing, though: their site's woefully invalid, inaccessible, and well nigh unusable. Littered with alt-bereft images and deprecated HTML, one wonders just how such a self-described prestigious series ...
By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Accessibility, HTML/XHTML, Usability, Validation
- Optimizing, Accessibility
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A new feature at Digital Web Magazine, Optimizing Your Chances with Accessibility, by Brandon Olejniczak, explains how following the recommendations and guidelines for accessible web authoring will increase traffic and web site page rank on search engines. Brandon writes:A second important but often neglected benefit of accessible Web sites ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility
- Amaya 8.3 Ready and Waiting
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The W3C's Amaya browser and authoring tool version 8.3 has just been released. It's available as binary downloads for a variety of platforms, and the source code is available. New features include improved CSS support and support for MathML.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Authoring Tools
- It’s Over for Eolas
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In what hopefully will be the last time we ever have to hear the name, Eolas is in the news again. The US Patent Office has heeded the call of the W3C and invalidated the patent. Eolas has 60 days to appeal, but we'll keep our fingers crossed that they ...
- A Denmark Standards Survey
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Soren Johannessen of Denmark undertook the task of surveying how many governmental, national, municipal authorities follow the W3C Standards for HTML/XHTML markup in Denmark. Gathering the list of 2033 sites from an alphabetical listing at the Danish Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation (online list), Soren began testing ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- WYSIWYG CSS Editors Coming of Age?
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The good folks at westciv have released a new version of their style editor, Style Master 3.5. I took some time to work with it today and was rather impressed. There are some super cool features such as a browser support watcher, multiple ways of viewing and applying properties and ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Authoring Tools, CSS, Design
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)