Buzz Archives: Authoring Tools
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By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 2008
- Announcing the Adobe Task Force
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Today WaSP announced that the Dreamweaver Task Force will be renamed the Adobe Task Force to reflect a widened scope.
By Stephanie Sullivan | March 10th, 2008
- Opting-in to standards support
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In this week’s issue of A List Apart, I was (finally) able to reveal Microsoft’s new strategy for forward-compatibility, a strategy that was developed hand-in-hand with several of us here at WaSP.
By Aaron Gustafson | January 22nd, 2008
- UK government accessibility consultation
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The UK government has issued a consultation document on Delivering Inclusive Websites. It's not finalised, as the consultation doesn't end until November 13 (my birthday, by the way …) but in its current state it's not a bad document; it rehashes PAS 78, recognises that the only way to find out ...
By Bruce Lawson | November 4th, 2007
- London: Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0
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Organised by the RNIB, Shawn Lawton Henry will be talking about WCAG 2.0 at Westminster University, New Cavendish campus on Tuesday 5th June 7pm.
By Mike Davies | May 28th, 2007
- Which is better for the web: single vendor homogeneity, or OSS/Web 2.0-style innovation?
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Brendan Eich, the principal creator of JavaScript and one of the leading developers for the Mozilla project, follows up his SXSW presentation, which illustrates parallels between historical examples of user-community-driven innovation and the current state of affairs in the web useragent space. (Say that fast ten times.) In today’s post ...
By Ben Henick | March 12th, 2007
- Feeling validated
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The W3C validator is a great tool. It allows developers to quickly and easily find and fix the inevitable problems that creep into any markup document. As well as the quick'n'easy version, the advanced interface allows you to get a more verbose output. Until recently, one of the options was to ...
By Jeremy Keith | October 31st, 2006
- Flash, JavaScript, UX, standards, apologia, apologies, and one man’s opinions
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The recent discussion of plug-in implementation, here and elsewhere, points to broader issues that affect everyone who is invested in web standards adoption.
By Ben Henick | August 18th, 2006
- Microsoft Expression Preview Release
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Set to debut in June of 2006 Microsoft has publically released a free trial preview of its newest web authoring tool, Microsoft Expression Web Designer.
By Holly Marie Koltz | May 15th, 2006
- Lessons that the standardization process can teach us
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Over at Six Apart they’re working to turn Trackback into a standard, and WaSP emeritus Anil Dash shares some of the wisdom he’s gained from the process. Some of the points he makes have bearing on the things we’re trying to accomplish over here at WaSP…
By Ben Henick | May 1st, 2006
- Painless Node Creation with DOM Builder
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Dan Webb’s DOM Builder takes the finickiness out of standards-based markup generation.
By Jeremy Keith | April 14th, 2006
- Yahoo Releases its User Interface Library
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Graded Browser Support, design patterns library, user interface library. Its been a busy day over at the Yahoo Developer Network.
By Jeremy Keith | February 14th, 2006
- AJAX for Eclipse
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IBM, Mozilla, Zimbra and Dojo announce a project to develop AJAX widgets for Eclipse.
By Chris Kaminski | February 2nd, 2006
- Developer Resources
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Yahoo have just added a JavaScript center to their Developer Network.
By Jeremy Keith | December 18th, 2005
- Tool for tracking IE memory leaks
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Drip, the IE leak detector.
By Chris Kaminski | December 6th, 2005
- WaSP Microsoft Task Force Update: Upcoming Products, XAML, Acid2, SXSW, and IE7 Revealed
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The WaSP Microsoft Task Force held another face-to-face meeting with available members on Tuesday. We met in a Starbucks along the waterfront in rainy Seattle. While the setting might have been a bit predictable, the conversation was unique and at times, very encouraging. WaSPs at the meeting were DL Byron ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 2nd, 2005
- Debugging JavaScript with jsTrace
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Aaron Gustafson gives us a very handy tool for debugging scripts: jsTrace.
By Jeremy Keith | October 27th, 2005
- XML Nanny: Validation Tool
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For those who design and develop their sites on a Mac, Todd Ditchendorf has developed a handy tool to help validate XML and XHTML documents from the comfort of your own desktop. XML Nanny cares for your XHTML documents in places the W3C web-based validation service can't reach... Suppose you are ...
By Drew McLellan | September 19th, 2005
- Microsoft Dropping Support for XHTML1.1
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Or at least they're dropping support for it in ASP.Net 2.0. Is this a bad thing? The initial reaction might be one of shock and indignation, that it is a step backwards. Another response might be to accept that it's a realistic decision to make and one that actually helps ...
By Ian Lloyd | September 1st, 2005
- Meeting Microsoft
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Since the announcement of the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force we’ve had two face to face meetings. The first was held in Portland, Oregon at WebVisions ‘05. WaSP members DL Byron and myself met with Microsoft’s liaison to the Task Force, Brian Goldfarb. In this meeting, we brainstormed potential ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 21st, 2005
- Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
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I just got home from Macworld Expo, and I spent some time looking around through the eyes of someone who cares about Web standards… The good: If you have OS X, and you don't have TextWrangler 2.0 from Bare Bones, go download it now. It's okay, I'll wait. Back now? Hey, ...
By Dori Smith | January 15th, 2005
- GoLive to Join CS 2.0
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According to ThinkSecret, a revived GoLive 8.0 will join Creative Suite v2.0 to be released in early 2005. The news item reports Adobe is working to improve the handling of CSS content including a toolbar for adjusting CSS layouts.Also getting a makeover is the grid element for CSS DIV ...
By Meryl K. Evans | September 24th, 2004
- MacRabbit
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MacRabbit is a new CSS editor for the Mac. I haven't had a go with it yet, but the extraction feature alone, which allows you to suck down the CSS for an arbitrary site using a custom user agent string so you can 'spoof' different browsers and circumvent browser-sniffing, looks ...
By Chris Kaminski | September 20th, 2004
- FrontPage Horrors
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>Frontpage 2003 is still the current version in August of 2004? I guess that's the problem with using a date in your product name. Or maybe it's an indication of a larger updating problem. >Here's [an article][1] featured on the FrontPage homepage within the Office website: "Create a structured page layout ...
By Meryl K. Evans | August 20th, 2004
- Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE/Win
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Chris Pederick's outstanding Web Developer Toolbar has long been a must-have tool for web developers & designers using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Now, webheads who're still using IE for Windows (yes, there really are some, and they deserve our pity ;-) have a comparable tool: the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Much ...
By Chris Kaminski | August 13th, 2004
- W3C Log Validator updated
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A new version of the W3C Log Validator was announced by Olivier Thereaux yesterday on the W3C's validator mailing list. The new version (v 0.3) has added features, bug fixes, and two new modules - CSS Validation and an experimental survey module. Do you need to convert a large web site ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | June 9th, 2004
- 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 | May 2nd, 2004
- W3C Link Checker Stands Alone
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The W3C link checker has been upgraded, and a standalone version released. You can: Check your links online. Download the standalone link checker utility. Both the service and the standalone tool are free. As always, the W3C is openly soliciting your feedback and bug reports about its validation products and services.
By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 2nd, 2004
- 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 | March 10th, 2004
- 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 | March 4th, 2004
- XForms Validation
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The XForms Institute announced the launch of its new Web service, currently in beta: Free Online XForms Validation. The site also hosts interactive XForms tutorials and content from the O'Reilly book, XForms Essentials authored by Micah Dubinko. The online service validates XForms documents by URL, file upload and text area input ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | February 23rd, 2004
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 (37)