Buzz Archives for May 2004
Bookmarks for Standards Testing
In the linkdump to end all linkdumps, Joe Clark has posted a massive list of bookmarks for standards and accessibility testing. With links covering everything from color deficiency to progressive enhancement, Joe's bookmarks are worth poring over for an hour or eight — an excellent, exhaustive resource.
By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Tables, easier?
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Patrick Griffiths points out a few flaws with those thinking that tables are easier for layout than Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), in his entry, Tables My Ass.One myth is that CSS is 'hard'. It isn't hard. Well, not any more difficult than any other approach. The problem is that experienced ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in CSS
- No Peeing in the Pool
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Last week, Google reignited the syndication wars by relaunching Blogger with support for the Atom syndication format and API in the free service, but RSS support only in the paid Blogger Pro. A few days later, the W3C fanned the flames by offering Atom a home. Some, including Microsoft über-blogger ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Standards: A Long Term Investment
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In Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line, D. Keith Robinson highlights some of the long-term perils of failing to adhere to established standards for web development. It can be tempting to view web standards only in terms of the initial development process - and it's this perspective that can lead to ...
By Drew McLellan | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Webby Award Validation Woes
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If content is king then valid pages must be the poor suckers down in the dungeon. The Webby winners were announced today, and while certainly some of the most content-rich, culturally valuable, and technically helpful sites are on the roster of winners, there is only one valid home page among ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in HTML/XHTML, Validation, Web Standards (general)
- I18n
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I18n — you may have seen this abbreviation before, and you might even know that it stands for 'Internationalization', but do you know how to do it? With 3 new Working Drafts published over the past few days, the W3C has begun addressing content authors directly via their Internationalization GEO program. ...
By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- The New Blogger
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Blogger, Google's popular weblogging service, has just been thoroughly redesigned — and after looking under the hood, it becomes quickly apparent that they've drunk deeply from the web standards kool-aid. In their own announcement of the redesign, Blogger notes that their new blog templates are all CSS based, standards compliant, ...
By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS, Web Standards (general)
- Mozilla DOM Inspector
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Old news to some no doubt, Richard Rutter reveals that the DOM Inspector built in to Mozilla can be used for, among other things, sniffing out CSS bindings. Ever been stuck looking at an element and scratching your head wondering which, exactly, of the 20 possible cascading style rules is affecting ...
- Just One Reason Why We Put An End To The Browser Upgrade Campaign
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Those who have followed the WaSP for several years will remember the Browser Upgrade Campaign, a spirited attempt to get rid of old, weak, and infirm browsers that lacked support for Web standards through encouraging people to upgrade to new, strong, and healthy browsers with strong bones and a shiny ...
By Steven Champeon | Filed in Browsers
- Markup Validator Upgrade
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Announced today, the W3C has released a big upgrade to their popular markup validation service: (The new release) features new documentation and navigation, and offers helpful explanations and recovery mechanisms instead of fatal errors. To the unpaid volunteers who maintain our trusty steed, a big round of thanks and praise for making ...
By Dave Shea | Filed in Validation
- Message To The Messengers
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In a nostalgic nod to the past, John Allsopp of WestCiv praises they that went before us as he pays respects to a small group who worked with CSS before CSS was workable. Message To The Messengers sheds some light on the work done in the late 90's by a crew ...
By Ethan Marcotte | Filed in CSS
- WYSIWYG + W3C? Y!
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This one's for anyone in search of a standards-compliant, in-browser XHTML editor for their CMS (or weblog tool, or webmail client, or... you get the idea) XStandard was built with standards and accessibility in mind: XStandard manages rich content in any language, has strong accessibility features, and supports popular editing options including ...
By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Bold? Italic? It’s all semantic to me.
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While we all know a big goal of the W3C's work is to separate our presentation from our document's structure, Matthew Thomas points out that sometimes the proper elements to do the job don't exist. When semantic markup goes bad showcases logical flaws in, for example, replacing all instances of <b> ...
By Dave Shea | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Stylin’ Atom, Talkin’ Turkey, Easin’ into Accessibility
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Mark Pilgrim's been diving into using CSS to style his Atom feed. He's got an interesting discussion about what he's done plus examples on his weblog. But you have to use a real browser to see it work - I'm sure you're all as shocked and surprised as I ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Accessibility, CSS, Web Standards (general)
- Ohio State University: Kudos
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Looking for a web standards job? This morning while reading an unrelated article about finding a job that suits work standards, I thought why not use Google to find openings for web standards jobs? My Google search terms, *job openings web design standards guidelines accessibility* returned results that included The Web ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Training, Web Standards (general)
- It’s Okay to SMIL Again
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The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) - pronounced smile - is an XML-based W3C specification that offers numerous creative and practical uses for web-based multimedia applications. But, SMIL has been frowning along for years now with no significant activity or momentum. If you've been wondering whether SMIL was headed off to ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in W3C/Standards Documentation
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)