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Buzz Archives: Web Standards (general)

Stylin’ Atom, Talkin’ Turkey, Easin’ into Accessibility

Mark Pilgrim's been diving into using CSS to style his Atom feed. He's got an interesting discussion about what he's done plus examples on his weblog. But you have to use a real browser to see it work - I'm sure you're all as shocked and surprised as I ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 3rd, 2004

Ohio State University: Kudos

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

A Roadmap to Standards

Dave Shea: a man with too much time on his hands, or simply chock-full of genius? In either event, dash over to read A Roadmap to Standards. A veritable blognum opus, Dave's essay explains in practical, real-world terms the need for DOCTYPEs, validation, and structured markup — it's a must-read ...

By Ethan Marcotte | April 30th, 2004

New Zealand Hearts Standards

In a sweeping online initiative, the New Zealand government has set a 1 January 2006 deadline for all government websites to comply (article no longer available) with the national accessibility guidelines. The mandates were issued in the spirit of ensuring New Zealanders' right of access to government information and services ...

By Ethan Marcotte | April 6th, 2004

El Reg in CSS

The Register, the web's most vitriolic source of IT industry news, has made the leap to CSS and web standards - and they've done it with style. The new site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and makes extensive use of CSS. While they still use a solitary table for their ...

By Simon Willison | April 6th, 2004

The Way Forward With Web Standards

MACCAWS (Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards) have finally released their first white paper, The Way Forward with Web Standards. A document aimed at the technically minded, it presents an exhaustive business case for web standards while debunking common myths and misperceptions. And for the standards-naïve manager ...

By Ethan Marcotte | April 5th, 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

Are you X7.45 compliant?

The folks at no-http.org would like to see the ubiquitous 'http:' removed from the beginning of all our URLs. So instead of linking to "http://example.com/" in your pages, you would link to just "//example.com/". This is actually quite legal. RFC 1808 specifies that URLs beginning with '//' should just inherit ...

By Anders Pearson | March 26th, 2004

A Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev

Read it, read it again. Save it. Print it. Highlight key points. (there are many) The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev by Heidi Pollock (webmonkey, 5 Mar 2004)It takes one gigantabig tutorial to teach you how to build sites for all those itty, bitty devices.One of the better pieces (I have encountered) that ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 12th, 2004

A Denmark Standards Survey

Soren Johannessen of Denmark undertook the task of surveying how many governmental, national, municipal authorities follow the W3C Standards for HTML/XHTML markup in Denmark. Gathering the list of 2033 sites from an alphabetical listing at the Danish Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation (online list), Soren began testing ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 5th, 2004

The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients, and you

Presentation to the Web Standards Group, Macromedia User Group and Cold Fusion User Group at MXDU2004: Day Zero. [ Via wg ]

By Meryl K. Evans | February 26th, 2004

XForms Validation

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

XML Basics

Starting last month, Intranet Journal (intranetjournal.com) began hosting a series of articles on the topic of XML. These short articles help to demystify XML. A document authored with XML allows for the transformation and sharing of data or content between various devices and people. The first article, XML Basics and Benefits ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | January 31st, 2004

Standards On Your Bookshelf

As though you needed more proof that 2003 was a great year for standards, check out the Best Books for 2003 compiled by The Designer's Bookshelf. Surrounded by a trove of excellent titles, the only two books listed under "Best in Web Design" are Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards ...

By Ethan Marcotte | January 8th, 2004

PHP and Web Standards Conference

PaWS is the PHP and Web Standards conference, scheduled to take place from February 20th to 24th in Manchester, England. The call for papers has gone out, with a deadline for submissions of January 17th. The dual focus on PHP and standards based web development should make for some interesting ...

By Simon Willison | January 6th, 2004

Standards ’03

We're back, and we brought presents! The holidays have kept most of us at WaSP away from the nest, but rest assured that 2004 will ring in some big new developments around here. For now, let's look back on the year that was. Here are some highlights (and a few inevitable ...

By Dave Shea | January 2nd, 2004

SimpleQuiz

It's often hard to know what the most appropriate markup is for any given job. Should that small bit of text be wrapped in a <span> or an <h3>? When do you use <ul> and when do you use <dl>? And is there ever a time when it's appropriate to ...

By Dave Shea | December 18th, 2003

Best Practices in Web Page Development

The Apple Developer Connection has published an article on best practices in creating Web pages: Safari complies with standards, but not all browsers do, so you may need to adjust your site to look right to all readers. Learn how to design, modify and validate your website so that it can ...

By Steph Troeth | December 16th, 2003

Web Standards for Business

In his article “Web Standards for Business”, François Nonnenmacher talks about how the separation of content and presentation falls in line with enforcing corporate brand and image through style guides, and how employing Web standards can benefit a company's Web development process and technical support infrastructure.

By Steph Troeth | December 11th, 2003

Kamus yang memang istimewa

Jikalau kau memerlukan sesuatu perkataan dalam Bahasa Hindu, Bahasa Swahili, Bahasa Cina, ataupun Bahasa Inuit, kunjungilah laman Web ini. C'est une collection de dictionnaires multilingues. If you need a word in Hindi, Swahili, Chinese or Inuit, visit this Web site, a collection of multilingual dictionaries. Best of all, it's all valid ...

By Steph Troeth | December 10th, 2003

Vector Wiki Whiteboard

In the article, XML.com: Creating an SVG Wiki (November 19, 2003), author Danny Ayers shows how to make a whiteboard for Wiki using standards recommended SVG DOM. Danny gives the minimal code needed for the WikiWhiteboard which allows its users the ability to draw or scribble and use a button ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | November 23rd, 2003

Dear Slashdot

We need to talk. Daniel M. Frommelt's “Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards” provides spot-on coverage regarding Slashdot's lack of standard fare. “Slashdot is a very prominent site, but underneath the hood you will find an old jalopy that could benefit from a web standards mechanic.” Even Joe Clark hopes Frommelt's article will ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 22nd, 2003

SprintPCS does CSS

With a crisp new look, SprintPCS has re-launched as yet another well-designed, corporate standards-based showcase. Hats off to France Rupert and the rest of the team for their hard work. You can view France's design notes on his personal site, Point Break. You might note that there are a few ...

By Dave Shea | November 17th, 2003

Browser Targetting: Outdated

Locking users into a specific browser is soooo 1998. In an otherwise insightful new article by Jean Tillman of Unisys (the company that brought you the now-expired GIF patent, for those keeping notes), it's argued that those building web-based applications may wish to take advantage of browser-specific technology: Designers of Web-based applications, ...

By Dave Shea | November 13th, 2003

Validity of Eolas Patent To Be Reexamined

Apparently (and thankfully) swayed by the W3C's impassioned appeal, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has agreed to reexamine the validity of the Eolas patent: “A substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry has essentially raised a question of patentability with respect to the 906 patent ...

By Ethan Marcotte | November 12th, 2003

A Shopping Cart That Checks Out

No matter how hard we try, there will always be web sites that refuse to validate, don't want to play ball where it comes to accessibility and laugh in the face of table-free CSS layouts - and mostly these sites are the type that are generated dynamically (be that a ...

By Ian Lloyd | November 12th, 2003

Gooey Standards

Microsoft's announcement of their new XML-based GUI language, XAML (pronounced 'zammel'), at their Professional Developers Conference has focused attention on XML-based GUI languages. This is an area that has seen a tremendous amount of activity over the past few years, mostly out of the spotlight. Here's a partial overview of ...

By Chris Kaminski | October 30th, 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

Longhorn and XAML

A rumor popped up near the end of last week that Microsoft would be announcing a new markup language for building web applications, comparable to Mozilla's XUL. Today Microsoft made good on the rumor with a few bits and pieces from the distant Windows Longhorn release at its Professional Developer's ...

By Dave Shea | October 27th, 2003

ALA Back from Extended Leave

It would be remiss of us not to mention that WaSP co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman's pet project from days gone by is now back up and a-running - A List Apart lives and breathes, ladies and gentlemen. ALA 3.0 gets a great kick-start with the following articles: Facts and ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 22nd, 2003

Separation of Presentation and What?

Fellow WaSP Doug Bowman wonders: Are They Really Separated? His thoughtful weblog post offers some interesting points regarding the separation of presentation and “content,” questioning whether the two are really separable at all. From a markup purist's perspective, the issue isn't about presentation and content, rather presentation and structure. ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | October 15th, 2003

The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

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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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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