Buzz Archives: Authoring Tools
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 | 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
- Developer Toolbars
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Wouldn't it be nice to have one-click access to the validators? And surely there's an easier way to snap your browser window to a specific resolution without manually dragging a corner? Wouldn't the world be a better place if you could turn CSS off at any time, and back on ...
By Dave Shea | January 12th, 2004
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
WCAG 2.0 is a W3C Recommendation
By Matt May | December 11th, 2008
After 9.5 years of work, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 have reached W3C Recommendation status. On behalf of the WaSP Accessibility Task Force, I’d like to welcome WCAG 2 officially into the pantheon of Web standards.
I think this tweet by caledoniaman sums up the level of anticipation:
WCAG 2.0 and a new Guns ‘n’ Roses album in the same year. What’s the world coming to.
Interesting comparison. They’ve each had about as many pre-releases. In any case, I can say, having spent over 8 years with it, that WCAG 2 is not as entertaining as Chinese Democracy. But I do think that it’s better equipped to stand the test of time.
If I had to pick one thing I’m most happy about, I’d say it’s that the HTML- and text-centrism in WCAG 1 is largely gone. In its place is a much more flexible (dare I say robust?) concept of accessibility-supported technology. So when newer technologies can show themselves to be directly accessible, they too can be used in WCAG 2-conformant content.
Over the years, many people have conflated “WCAG-conformant” with “accessible,” and that’s led to people making statements like: “Don’t use JavaScript–it’s inaccessible.” That’s bad for everyone, from users with disabilities who actually can work with JavaScript (which is to say, the vast majority), to Web designers and developers, to policymakers, to those developing new technologies.
With WCAG 2, “Don’t use x” is no longer valid. (Was it ever?) It is now up to you, the developer, to work on the direct accessibility of your content, no matter what technology you choose. I believe we’re about to experience a new wave of accessible design techniques, as a result.
But first, we need to flush “Don’t use x” out of our system. Some are accustomed to saying it about anything they’re not comfortable with. That’s only holding accessible design back. It’s time to learn what’s out there, today, and use it in everyday Web design. It’s time to make everyone’s Web more accessible. Have a look at the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation, and its supporting material. Then, start thinking about what a more accessible Web could be. We still have a lot of work to do.
Filed in Accessibility, Accessibility TF, W3C/Standards Documentation, Web Standards (general) | Comments (8)