Buzz Archives: Browsers
France and Germany call for the end of IE6
Google’s disclosure of a December cyber attack, originating in China, prompts two major governments to push for the aging browser’s demise.
By Aaron Gustafson | January 20th, 2010
- Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification.
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You've heard it's coming in 2012. Or maybe 2022. It's certainly not ready yet, but some parts are already in browsers now so for the standards-savvy developers, the future is worth investigating today. Ian "Hixie" Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, hopes that the spec will go to ...
By Bruce Lawson | May 13th, 2009
- IE8 Has Arrived
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With a greater focus on standards-compliance, it seems possible that Microsoft’s latest browser may redeem itself in the eyes of standards-savvy designers and developers.
By Aaron Gustafson | March 20th, 2009
- WAI ARIA Last Call, and Safari 4
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The W3C’s WAI ARIA moves to Last Call Working Draft; appropriately, the Safari 4 Beta is out, featuring improved ARIA support.
By Derek Featherstone | February 24th, 2009
- UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails
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You might remember that I published a post called UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance last September, calling out a draft document outlining some UK government browser testing guidelines. These suggested that for government web sites, webmasters need not test in less popular browsers (those with ...
By Bruce Lawson | January 19th, 2009
- WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed recommendations
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WCAG 2 and the mobileOK Basic Tests specifications have been moved to "proposed recommendation status" by the W3C, which means that the technical material is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. WCAG 2 Shawn Henry writes of WCAG 2, Over the last few months, the Web Content ...
By Bruce Lawson | November 4th, 2008
- Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?
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Acid3 progress and what it really means.
By Lars Gunther | October 2nd, 2008
- UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance
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This blog post is superseded by UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails. Last friday, the UK government's Central Office of Information (COI) published a public consultation on browser standards for public sector websites: This guidance has been developed to assist those delivering public sector websites to determine which web browsers to ...
By Bruce Lawson | September 8th, 2008
- Acid 2 Test Back to Normal
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The Acid 2 test hosted here on the WaSP site was broken but is now fixed.
By Derek Featherstone | July 24th, 2008
- Opera 9.5 released
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Just a short buzz: the final version of Opera 9.5 was released today, with a boatload of exciting features. Of particular interest: excellent support for current standards — (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 partial implementations of new emerging standards — CSS 3, HTML 5, and ARIA More details about the browser's ...
By Patrick Lauke | June 12th, 2008
- Mozilla Download Day [German Translation]
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Mozilla hat sich vorgenommen, ins Guinness Buch der Rekorde zu kommen mit den meisten Software-Downloads in 24 Stunden! Darum wird der 17. Juni 2008 ein besonderer Tag sein: der Download Day. Was wird an diesem Tag so Besonderes sein? Mozilla möchte den Weltrekord aufstellen für die meisten Software-Downloads an einem einzigen ...
By Glenda Sims | June 1st, 2008
- Mozilla Download Day
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Mozilla is on a mission to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours!
By Kimberly Blessing | May 29th, 2008
- Acid3 Passed in 23 Days!
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On March 3, the Web Standards Project launched the Acid3 Browser Test. On March 26, two browser teams reported that their builds passed.
By Kimberly Blessing | April 7th, 2008
- Microsoft releases the first IE8 Beta
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In other news, the ACID2 test page has become overwhelmed.
By Aaron Gustafson | March 5th, 2008
- 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 | March 3rd, 2008
- WaSP Round Table: IE8’s Default Version Targeting Behavior
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One week ago, several WaSP members took the time to have a virtual sit-down with Chris Wilson of Microsoft to talk about IE8’s proposed default behavior of having to opt-in for the browser’s new standards mode.
By Aaron Gustafson | February 24th, 2008
- Hug your bike, drink a beer and discuss a browser
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March is coming up and for most people in the web standards community, that means at least one thing: SXSW! The Web Standards Project will be present again this year, with our annual meeting (held on Monday the 10th, exact details to follow soon). Because there's so much going on in ...
By Faruk Ateş | February 5th, 2008
- Acid3 nearing completion
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If you’re a fan of the Acid browser tests, you already know that Acid3 is in the works. It’s now in a “final review” state, so please check it out and submit your feedback.
By Kimberly Blessing | February 5th, 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
- What’s the best test for Acid3?
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Now that all the major browsers (and many minor ones) have pledged support for Acid2, Ian Hickson has moved on to preparing Acid3 — and you can help!
By Kimberly Blessing | January 16th, 2008
- Farewell Netscape
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So, the web browser we know as Netscape is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-browser. But how do we all feel about this really? Will the browser ‘be sorely missed’? Did it pass away peacefully in the night, a lot later than many of us thought it would? Or are some people out there in denial that it has actually happened, grieving for this once great web icon?
By Ian Lloyd | December 28th, 2007
- IE8 passes Acid2 test
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Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer's dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This doesn't necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, ...
By Bruce Lawson | December 19th, 2007
- Opera complains to Europe over IE lock-in
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Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to unbundle Internet ...
By Bruce Lawson | December 13th, 2007
- Mobile Safari without the iPhone
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Apple has brought Mobile Safari to the iPod.
By Aaron Gustafson | September 10th, 2007
- The good, the bad, and the ugly – iPhone edition
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The iPhone has had a tremendous impact on the web, eliciting impassioned testimony from supporters and detractors alike. What does it mean for the web standards? What about the rest of the mobile web? And (how) should we design for it?
By Aaron Gustafson | August 22nd, 2007
- Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac and Windows
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As the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off today, Steve Jobs announced the availability of the Safari 3 Public Beta — for both Mac and Windows. Caution: bug reports abound.
By Kimberly Blessing | June 12th, 2007
- Current browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
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In web accessibility, you’ll often hear emphasis being placed on the duty of web authors to create accessible content. However, this is only one part of the web accessibility equation.One that has been particularly close to me, or rather one that has provided me with a lot of opportunity to ...
By Patrick Lauke | May 20th, 2007
- Browser, Standards and Interop Summit in Paris
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The XTech 2007 conference is taking place at the Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel in Paris next week from the 15th to the 18th of May. On the first day of the conference, Molly and Edd have organised the first annual Browser, Standards and Interop Summit to run all day in parallel ...
By Jeremy Keith | May 11th, 2007
- Bringing standards to Microsoft
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WaSP Emeritus (and former fearless leader) Molly Holzschlag is settling into her new position at Microsoft this week and has begun reporting from the trenches with an overview of what she’ll be doing while she’s there.
By Aaron Gustafson | April 2nd, 2007
- A band-aid for browsers
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With tongue firmly in cheek, DOM Scripting Task Force member Dean Edwards says: Just what the world needs, another JavaScript library. That hasn't stopped him from creating Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation™. But this isn't a big full-featured library along the lines of jQuery or YUI. Instead, this works more along ...
By Jeremy Keith | March 26th, 2007
- Talking with Microsoft about IE.next
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I was in Redmond on Friday to meet with a few folks on the Internet Explorer team to discuss improvements we (as in the WaSP DOM Scripting and Microsoft task forces, and the JS Ninjas) wanted to see in IE.next.
By Aaron Gustafson | February 4th, 2007
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 (27)