Buzz Archives for March 2008
Announcing the Adobe Task Force
Today WaSP announced that the Dreamweaver Task Force will be renamed the Adobe Task Force to reflect a widened scope.
By Stephanie Sullivan | Filed in Adobe TF, Adobe TF*, Authoring Tools, Outreach, WaSP Announcement
- Annual Public WaSP Meeting at SXSW
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All SXSW Interactive attendees are welcome to attend WaSP's annual public meeting which will be held tomorrow, Monday, March 10. The session runs from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm (Central Daylight Time) and will be held in room 19AB (Level 4). Everyone is welcome to join our Meebo chat as ...
By Kimberly Blessing | Filed in General, Outreach
- Street Team: Make Your Mark
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The WaSP Street Team launches its first community project: bookmarks which you can place in libraries, schools, and bookstores to help signal to readers that the material is out of date.
By Glenda Sims | Filed in General, Outreach, Street Team, Training, Web Standards (general)
- Microsoft releases the first IE8 Beta
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In other news, the ACID2 test page has become overwhelmed.
By Aaron Gustafson | Filed in Browsers, Microsoft
- Microsoft rethinks IE8’s default behavior
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Perhaps it was our complaining or perhaps it was a reconsideration of its own interoperability principles, but Microsoft has decided to change its course on IE8 and will opt-in to its new standards mode by default.
By Aaron Gustafson | Filed in Browsers, Microsoft, Microsoft TF
- Acid3: Putting Browser Makers on Notice, Again.
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It's been three years since we told browser makes that we want to see them smile, but now we wanna hold their hand. Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser's DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and ...
By Drew McLellan | Filed in Acid3, General, WaSP Announcement
- What do you want from CSS3 – one week left
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(Polish translation) As part of the outreach work we're doing in partnership with the W3C's CSS Working group, we invited all web professionals to tell the Working Group what they want from the next version of the spec. As the Working Group's face-to-face meeting is at the end of March, we will ...
By Bruce Lawson | Filed in Action, CSS, Design, W3C/Standards Documentation
- Yahoo! UK & Ireland TV Listings site relaunches, chock full of standards
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While it's become much more common than, say, a couple years ago, it still deserves mention whenever a high-profile website relaunches with exemplary web development practices. Such is the case with the Yahoo! UK & Ireland TV Listings site, which this past week relaunched with some of the leanest and ...
By Faruk Ateş | Filed in General, 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
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)