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Buzz Archives: DOM

IE8 Has Arrived

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

Acid3 nearing completion

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

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

London: Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0

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

A band-aid for browsers

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

Which is better for the web: single vendor homogeneity, or OSS/Web 2.0-style innovation?

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

Reducing the pain of adopting a JavaScript library

Why is it so difficult to adopt a new JavaScript library? Chris Heilmann offers library developers a path for improvement.

By Mike Davies | December 12th, 2006

You can improve IE.next

If you’ve ever wanted the opportunity to tell Microsoft what they should do with IE next, now is the time.

By Aaron Gustafson | November 4th, 2006

Video Presentation: Douglas Crockford on the “Theory of the DOM”

Douglas Crockford, discoverer of JSON and JavaScript evangelist/veteran has given a training on the theory of the DOM lately and the videos are available on the web. The course takes you through the theory of the DOM, how browsers implement it and what the problems with the DOM and the ...

By Christian Heilmann | October 18th, 2006

Event Handling versus Event Delegation

It is not new, but it still is rather clever: In order to avoid having to add event handlers to each and every element you want to monitor, you can use one single handler on a parent element and let browser event bubbling do the rest of the work for ...

By Christian Heilmann | September 24th, 2006

Detecting when good fonts change size

Designing for the web is challenging enough, but when you need to take into account scaling font-sizes, it can quickly become a nightmare. The common wisdom is to design your pages to accomodate fonts two sizes up and two sizes down from the default, but with this new script from two clever Yahoo! blokes, your can get way more clever.

By Aaron Gustafson | September 12th, 2006

Maintainable JavaScript

The Web Standards Group (not to be confused with the Web Standards Project) is a grassroots organisation based in Australia dedicated to promoting web standards and accessibility. The organisation's activities have now spread to the other side of the world. The first Web Standards Group event in London was held last ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 18th, 2006

Talking about JavaScript in London

JavaScript was just one of the items on the menu at this year's @media conference in London. The panel on JavaScript libraries featured Simon Willison, Stuart Langridge, Peter-Paul Koch, Dan Webb and the host with the most, Cameron Adams. It was a highly entertaining romp through the pros and cons ...

By Jeremy Keith | July 3rd, 2006

JavaScript beyond the browser

It's always interesting to see Web Standards used in a setting outside the browser. Did you know, for instance, that the chat client Adium can be skinned using CSS? JavaScript is showing up in more and more desktop apps. Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's widgets (formerly Konfabulator) are the obvious examples. But ...

By Jeremy Keith | June 23rd, 2006

Promoting the responsible use of JavaScript: writing, teaching and presenting

The members of the DOM Scripting Task force have been busy writing and reviewing books, teaching and presenting at conferences and workshops, and preparing for upcoming events; focusing on the responsible use of JavaScript, as well as accessible JavaScript. Here’s an update of recent and forthcoming activities our Task Force members are involved in. Next stop is @media 2006 – see you there!

By Mike Davies | June 12th, 2006

IBM Endorses Dojo and Lends Accessibility Support

On Monday, IBM officially announced its support for the Dojo Toolkit JavaScript framework. This announcement comes soon after the creation of the Dojo Accessibility email list, and like its other open source donations, IBM’s support for Dojo includes a major emphasis on accessibility for people with disabilities. Several weeks ago, Dojo ...

By James Craig | June 6th, 2006

A DOM Scripting Wishlist for Microsoft

Peter Paul Koch has kick-started a discussion called “IE 7 and JavaScript: what needs to be fixed?”

By Jeremy Keith | April 30th, 2006

Print-ready poster: separation in a nutshell

Natalie Jost put together a print-ready poster, available as a PDF file, which describes the benefit of standards-friendly development techniques in a visual way. It's behind a link within the entry in question. Try it, you might like it. It's one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" ...

By Ben Henick | April 17th, 2006

Painless Node Creation with DOM Builder

Dan Webb’s DOM Builder takes the finickiness out of standards-based markup generation.

By Jeremy Keith | April 14th, 2006

DOM Builder

Now here’s a script we can get behind… Dan Webb’s DOM Builder combines the ease of innerHTML with the precision of DOM methods.

By Jeremy Keith | April 13th, 2006

Trying to explain the differences between DHTML and DOM scripting with an example

A summary of the issues around DHTML, and the value behind DOM Scripting.

By Christian Heilmann | March 29th, 2006

Dean Edwards Speaks

Jonathan Snook interviews Dean Edwards.

By Jeremy Keith | March 20th, 2006

Cross-Browser Comparison of Scripting Libraries

A scorecard of scripting libraries.

By Christian Heilmann | March 6th, 2006

Quick Explanation of the Object Literal

Christian Heilmann explains the object literal JavaScript syntax.

By Christian Heilmann | February 17th, 2006

Yahoo Releases its User Interface Library

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

getElementsByTagNames()

getElementsByTagNames() returns elements with several tag names in the order they appear in the document.

By Peter-Paul Koch | January 30th, 2006

Shorter DOMScripting via Cloning vs. Generating New Elements?

Is cloning nodes quicker than generating new elements?

By Christian Heilmann | January 6th, 2006

JavaScript Animation for Beginners

A beginner-level tutorial on JavaScript animation from Emrah Baskaya.

By Chris Kaminski | December 29th, 2005

JavaScript Tips From Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards starts JavaScript tips with speeding up object detection.

By Jeremy Keith | December 27th, 2005

Star HTML and Microsoft IE7

Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for IE Platform and Security at Microsoft, and Position is Everything's Big John Gallant have been having a conversation about * html in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7 for Windows (IE7). Wilson has been encouraging CSS designers and developers to repair any bug-specific hacks ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | December 22nd, 2005

Developer Resources

Yahoo have just added a JavaScript center to their Developer Network.

By Jeremy Keith | December 18th, 2005

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:

  1. To support small businesses by protecting them from bad developers and making sure they get the best websites possible; and
  2. 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)

More Buzz articles

Title Author
France and Germany call for the end of IE6 Aaron Gustafson
Be a True Blue Beanie Supporter of Web Standards Glenda Sims
Introducing The Open Web Education Alliance Aarron Walter
Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification. Bruce Lawson

All of the entries posted in WaSP Buzz express the opinions of their individual authors. They do not necessarily reflect the plans or positions of the Web Standards Project as a group.

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