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Buzz Archives: HTML/XHTML

Embedding Objects the Valid Way

As part of his piece on best practices for online captioning, Joe Clark has also published a compendium of techniques for using <embed> and <object> with valid markup. This one's going in the bookmarks for sure.

By Chris Kaminski | September 9th, 2004

XHTML and document.write()

Ian Hickson has written a nice little explanation of the problems with document.write() in XHTML documents that are served with an XHTML MIME type.

By Chris Kaminski | August 9th, 2004

XHTML 2.0 Draft Update, Debate Ensues

The W3C has released the sixth (that's right, sixth) draft of XHTML 2.0. Despite its draft status, the release re-ignited the ongoing HTML vs. XHTML debate. Here's a simple little fact: You don't have to use XHTML if you don't want to! The point isn't that XHTML is wonderful and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 23rd, 2004

WHAT’s going on?

Over on the WHAT WG front, Ian Hickson has posted an update on the progress of WHAT WG in their efforts to develop backwards-compatible extensions to HTML. Ian’s post includes some very interesting background to the formation of WHAT and the impetus behind their efforts. Joe Gregorio has some other ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 10th, 2004

What’s in a namespace?

Following up on Anders Pearson's Safari post, Dave Hyatt has decided to use namespaces for the Apple's HTML extensions. The move seems to have largely satisfied Eric Meyer and Tim Bray, though Eric would still like to see a different DOCTYPE used. Personally, I agree with their ultimate conclusion: things ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 10th, 2004

DOCTYPES at Twelve Paces

Sergio Villarreal has a great little article entitled Tables vs. CSS – A Fight To The Death over at SitePoint. It's an excellent blow-by-blow analysis of the benefits to, and drawbacks of, each approach — and naturally, CSS emerges as the author's preferred method. That makes us all sunshine-y inside.

By Ethan Marcotte | June 2nd, 2004

Standards: A Long Term Investment

In Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line, D. Keith Robinson highlights some of the long-term perils of failing to adhere to established standards for web development. It can be tempting to view web standards only in terms of the initial development process - and it's this perspective that can lead to ...

By Drew McLellan | May 14th, 2004

Webby Award Validation Woes

If content is king then valid pages must be the poor suckers down in the dungeon. The Webby winners were announced today, and while certainly some of the most content-rich, culturally valuable, and technically helpful sites are on the roster of winners, there is only one valid home page among ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 12th, 2004

I18n

I18n — you may have seen this abbreviation before, and you might even know that it stands for 'Internationalization', but do you know how to do it? With 3 new Working Drafts published over the past few days, the W3C has begun addressing content authors directly via their Internationalization GEO program. ...

By Dave Shea | May 11th, 2004

WYSIWYG + W3C? Y!

This one's for anyone in search of a standards-compliant, in-browser XHTML editor for their CMS (or weblog tool, or webmail client, or... you get the idea) XStandard was built with standards and accessibility in mind: XStandard manages rich content in any language, has strong accessibility features, and supports popular editing options including ...

By Dave Shea | May 5th, 2004

Bold? Italic? It’s all semantic to me.

While we all know a big goal of the W3C's work is to separate our presentation from our document's structure, Matthew Thomas points out that sometimes the proper elements to do the job don't exist. When semantic markup goes bad showcases logical flaws in, for example, replacing all instances of <b> ...

By Dave Shea | May 4th, 2004

more freebies from westciv

In their ongoing efforts to spread the good word about markup and CSS, Westciv is offering FREE courses on HTML 4 and XHTML starting this week and running for the next several months. The free program is excellent for those brand new to standards, or for those folks using CSS but ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 19th, 2004

Safety First

We've all been there. You've got a blog. You've spent hours getting the templates and CSS just right. It even validates. You are the model of a cool, modern, standards aware weblogger. So you post a new entry to let the world know that you are now compliant. You even ...

By Anders Pearson | April 8th, 2004

Opera, IBM voice

ZDNet this week, offers up news where Standards meets Accessibility and Emerging technology with “Opera's browser finds its voice,” by Matt Loney and Paul Festa. Opera is adding voice control to its browser, enabling users to browse the Web and fill in voice-enabled Web forms by talking to their PC. ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 26th, 2004

Code As I Say, Not As I Do

The World Wide Web Conference is entering its thirteenth year, preparing for yet another round of action-packed W3-related developer events and presentations. Funny thing, though: their site's woefully invalid, inaccessible, and well nigh unusable. Littered with alt-bereft images and deprecated HTML, one wonders just how such a self-described prestigious series ...

By Ethan Marcotte | March 11th, 2004

XHTML Modularization Take Two

Over at the W3C the good folks of the HTML Working Group have released a working draft of Modularization of XHTML 1.0 - Second Edition for community review. Interesting items in the draft include implementation of abstract modules using XML schemas and a number of corrections based on three ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 19th, 2004

Definition Lists

Definition Lists: misused or misunderstood? “There are two points of view about the use of definition lists. Some people believe that definition lists should only be used for terms and definitions. Others believe that definition lists can be used to tie together any items that have a direct relationship with each ...

By Dave Shea | January 27th, 2004

XHTML Print

W3C has promoted the XHTML Print module to Candidate Recommendation status today. Aimed at low-end printers and sub-optimal printing conditions, the design objective of XHTML-Print is to provide a relatively simple, broadly supportable page description format where content preservation and reproduction are the goal.

By Dave Shea | January 21st, 2004

Benefits of XHTML Modularization

Just what is this magic word beginning with 'M' that spans six syllables? What does it mean, and what implications does it have for us? In this issue of “WaSP asks the W3C”, we learn some of the benefits of XHTML Modularization.

By Steph Troeth | December 17th, 2003

HTML or XHTML?

Why is it that the question you think is stupid is usually the one that everyone else is dying to ask? So which one is better: HTML or XHTML? Seems simple in the midst of this flurry of acronyms such as XAML and XUL. The W3C wants to help you ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | October 28th, 2003

Standards/Markup Article Round-up

Some good stuff that I've stumbled across that readers may find of interest. Bzzzzzz. Why Tables For Layout is Stupid - Whoa- that told you! Seriously, although the title of this presentation (from the Seybold 2003 in San Francisco) may seem a bit too admonishing for some, you cannot ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 28th, 2003

You Old Dog, You!

Well, perhaps not that old - HTMLdog was launched last week and aims to put HTML and CSS training under people's noses while not making a great song and dance about the standards compliance. "The underlying philosophy behind this website is to focus standards-compliant HTML and CSS ... but ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 13th, 2003

A table, s’il vous plaît

Tables have received so much bad press that some people think they're completely out. Which, of course, is true for last centurie's hodgepodge of spacer-gif-sliced-images-dozens-of-nested-tables nonsense.But there is a perfectly good use for them, too: Tabular data! And if you want to make your tabular data tables not only standards ...

By Matthias Gutfeldt | September 24th, 2003

When is a List Not a List?

When it's a horizontal navigation strip, perhaps? The Listamatic is a collection of examples of real-world CSS adaptations of the unordered list (<ul>) that demonstrate just how powerful the concept of separating presentation from content can be. Want to see a horizontal navigation scheme with rollover effects? Or maybe a more ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 15th, 2003

Revisiting XHTML

Ever since XHTML was introduced in January of 2000, arguments as to its use and rationale have been flung about in numerous XML, markup, and Web design forums and lists. Publishing our recent WaSP coverage on serving XHTML with the proper MIME type helped stir up the old pot once ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 5th, 2003

Is there a draft in here?

The third XHTML 2.0 Working Draft was published yesterday. It is largely a corrective release, fixing some problems that were introduced in the second Working Draft, which was made public last week. As the W3C points out, XHTML 2.0 is a relative of the Web's familiar publishing languages, HTML 4 and ...

By Porter Glendinning | December 19th, 2002

Valid XHTML + Flash

This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | November 9th, 2002

DHTML Done Right

Dynamic HTML, web standards and accessibility need not be mutually exclusive, as Dave Lindquist demonstrates with these cool DHTML menus. Both the dropdown and expandable tree variations are simple lists built with 100% valid XHTML Strict. CSS and DOM scripting provide the functionality, while ACCESSKEY attributes make parts of ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | October 31st, 2002

Article: The Secret Life of Markup

Webmonkey has published a new article by the WaSP's own Steven Champeon: The Secret Life of Markup. It's a must-read for any HTML author, and for anyone else who wants to better understand the craft of web development. And be sure to read to the end, or you'll miss what ...

By Eric Costello | October 15th, 2002

XHTML 2 and You

Among the unknown but probably smallish percentage of front-end designers who know and care about and use web standards, the announcement that XHTML 2.0 will not necessarily be backward compatible with XHTML 1.0 has caused some alarm. An article in IBM’s development zone claims this lack of backward compatibility is ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | September 23rd, 2002

Flash for XHTML?

Here's some weird convergence: DENG is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript. Accessibility issues aside, the concept of an embeddable, standards-compliant browser that renders XHTML and CSS with better accuracy than most desktop browsers is an exciting one. A week ago I had the ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | September 18th, 2002

Recent Buzz

Our Work Here is Done

By Aaron Gustafson | March 1st, 2013

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

Realizing that this fragmentation would inevitably drive up the cost of building websites and ran the risk of denying users access to content and services they needed, Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP and rallied an amazing group of web designers and developers to help them push back. The WaSP’s primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

• A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.
• HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.
• W3C Community Groups – If you have a passion for a specific web technology, you can help make it better by participating in one (or more) community groups. In particular, you might be interested in one of these: Core Mobile Web Platform, Responsive Images, Web Education, and Web Media Text Tracks.
• WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.
• Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.
• Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.
Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.

Filed in WaSP Announcement | Comments (89)

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An End to Aging IE Installs	Aaron Gustafson
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The Sherpas are Here	Aaron Gustafson