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Buzz Archives: Outreach

Web Design Course Materials Licensed to W3C

As professional web builders we know that the web is constantly changing and our methods and practices must respond and adapt as well. There are so many new disciplines web professionals need to be know about, if not specizlized in, that weren’t around ten or even five years ago. It’s ...

By Christopher Schmitt | February 8th, 2012

Beyond the Blue Beanie?

You put on your blue beanie every year. But you can make a difference throughout the year. For several years, web workers passionate about web standards have donned blue beanies for one day to bring attention to the importance of using web standards, keeping the web open, and continually moving it ...

By Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis | November 30th, 2011

The Sherpas are Here

After many months of hard work, we’re excited to announce the launch of Web Standards Sherpa.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 13th, 2011

Small Business Update

A while back I announced WaSP’s new small business outreach effort and, thanks to your help, we’ve been making great progress.

By Aaron Gustafson | August 5th, 2010

A New Direction and a New Project

In an effort to increase adoption of web standards, we’re going to try something new.

By Aaron Gustafson | February 2nd, 2010

Support the W3C Validators

The W3C has launched a donation and sponsorship program to support the free validators provided by the organization. Give today!

By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 2008

Want to set up a Web Standards Café?

As a hat tip to Blue Beanie Day 2008 and in the spirit of helping spread the word of web standards, the International Liaison Group thought we'd celebrate by putting together a Web Standard Café Kit. Web Standards Cafés have been held all over the world bringing together people passionate about ...

By Henny Swan | November 28th, 2008

Call-to-action: Save the UT Accessibility Institute

The University of Texas is closing its Accessibility Institute today. Non-profit Knowbility has started a petition to save it. Though you may not have heard of the Accessibility Institute, you have been influenced by its work. Its late founder, Dr. John Slatin, was the former co-chair of the Web Content Accessibility ...

By James Craig | August 29th, 2008

Announcing the WaSP Curriculum Framework

Since March 2008, the WaSP Education Task Force has begun working on the WaSP Curriculum Framework, a collection of tools aiming to identify skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers, as well as resources that will help both educators and students.

By Steph Troeth | July 31st, 2008

Curriculum Survey Results

The Web Standards Project Education Task Force release the results of the 2007 Curriculum Survey.

By Rob Dickerson | July 28th, 2008

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

Chris Mills of Opera Software ASA announced today the release of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. The initial 23 of 50 proposed articles are published and available.

By Rob Dickerson | July 8th, 2008

Opera 9.5 released

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]

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

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

WCAG 2 now “candidate recommendation”

The W3C announced today that WCAG2 is now a candidate recommendation and is likely to be "live" by the end of the year. The W3C says Candidate Recommendation means that we think the technical content is stable and we want developers and designers to start using WCAG 2.0, to test it out ...

By Bruce Lawson | April 30th, 2008

This is your mobile device on Acid

The W3C's Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group have just announced a new suite of tests for mobile devices. In the spirit of the Acid tests, the test results are returned in an easily grokable visual manner—the green squares are desirable, the red squares mean a feature isn't yet supported. The ...

By Jeremy Keith | April 16th, 2008

Showing Off My <body> and Loving It

I’m so tired of people half-assing it on Casual Day, but Naked Day? Now you have my full attention

By Christopher Schmitt | April 7th, 2008

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) Rewis | March 10th, 2008

Annual Public WaSP Meeting at SXSW

All SXSW Interactive attendees are welcome to attend WaSP's annual public meeting which will be held tomorrow, Monday, March 10. The session runs from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm (Central Daylight Time) and will be held in room 19AB (Level 4). Everyone is welcome to join our Meebo chat as ...

By Kimberly Blessing | March 9th, 2008

Street Team: Make Your Mark

The WaSP Street Team launches its first community project: bookmarks which you can place in libraries, schools, and bookstores to help signal to readers that the material is out of date.

By Glenda Sims | March 8th, 2008

The Email Standards Project

We all know that email clients aren’t consistent in their support of Web standards. Crafting an HTML email that renders correctly on most email clients is a delicate process which typically involves extra coding and a lot of guesswork. Up until now, we’ve begrudgingly accepted life this way… but a new effort aims to change that!

By Kimberly Blessing | November 28th, 2007

Wear the Blue Beanie with Pride

In honor of Jeffrey Zeldman’s blue beanie on the cover of his classic book, Monday, November 26th is blue beanie day. You can participate and share the Web standards benefits with everyone!

By Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis | November 23rd, 2007

Browser, Standards and Interop Summit in Paris

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

Notable web experts who are [x]: Women and non-Caucasians

[To those who are advocates of politically correct language, I apologize in advance for the blunt way in which I frame the role of race in this post.] Between Jason Kottke and WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman, the buzz is building yet again on the subject of conference panel composition… specifically, the ...

By Ben Henick | February 25th, 2007

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

The WaSP Café

Kazuhito Kidachi, the WaSP liaison in Japan, has started a new series of events dubbed the "WaSP Café". It is a social gathering where people can chat about web standards and related topics while drinking a nice cup of coffee. As Kazuhito says, "Why coffee? Because to talk seriously, it's ...

By Faruk Ateş | April 25th, 2006

WaSP International Liaison Group

With a growing interest around the world in Web standards, international relationships are becoming key. WaSP is seeking to create an International Liaison Group for the sharing of Web standards related information worldwide.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | April 18th, 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

Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions

This Thanksgiving I’ve decided it’s about time that I provided some more background and analysis on one of the things I am certainly unintentionally (in)famous for.

By Tantek Çelik | November 27th, 2005

Helping Hands for Displaced Designers

Designer Matthew Richmond of the fantabulous Chopping Block is someone I regard highly not just because of his creative skill, but because he's a designer who does beautiful Flash work and cares deeply about Web standards, too. Matthew sent out an email to friends and colleagues about a site ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | September 5th, 2005

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)

More Buzz articles

Title	Author
Call for action on Vendor Prefixes	Rachel Andrew
An End to Aging IE Installs	Aaron Gustafson
Beyond the Blue Beanie?	Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
The Sherpas are Here	Aaron Gustafson