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Buzz Archives: WaSP Announcement

WaSP Interviews: Todd Dominey

WaSP Interviews continues today with a look behind the scenes at PGA.com. Todd Dominey of Dominey Design talks about the heartache of an outdated Content Management System, integrating ugly advertising code with a standards-based site, and the finer points of CSS vs. Flash-based navigation. Read the interview.

By Dave Shea | December 8th, 2003

WaSP Interviews: Dan Cederholm

WaSP is pleased to introduce a new ongoing feature: WaSP Interviews. Taking a look at some of the groundbreaking new redesigns happening on the web, we intend to go behind the scenes and shed some light on why more and more big-name sites are turning to web standards. First on ...

By Dave Shea | November 18th, 2003

More WaSPs in the Nest

Today, we extend a warm welcome to two new WaSPs, Dave Shea and Ethan Marcotte. Both have done exceptional work for Web standards, and we are really honored to have them join the nest. I'm sure you'll be seeing some great insights and action from both in future weeks ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | October 26th, 2003

Cingular – Please Attend to your Own Customers

For the past few weeks, we have been subject to the occasional email from Cingular customers, complaining that they can't pay their bills online without a standard browser. At least once, we received mail from someone who had questions about his Cingular bill. Our mail to the Cingular webmaster bounced, ...

By Steven Champeon | October 7th, 2003

How Not to Get On the WaSPs Good Side

In fact, the best way to get on our bad side is to email our abuse account, which since we put it on our abuse page has received several hundred messages from spammers. People have tried to sell us DIY Web Site Solutions (complete with popup window warning us that their ...

By Steven Champeon | October 7th, 2003

Stop, children, what’s that sound?

17 new WaSPs buzzing. That's right. We have 17 new members, and a fresh perspective on the future. Everybody look what's going down: Read our press announcement, our current opinion, and what the press thinks about the whole noise.

By Molly E. Holzschlag | February 18th, 2003

Minor Administrative Post

We have upgraded our blog software to Moveable Type version 2.5.1. The upgrade should be seamless, but if not, please cut us some slack. :)

By Steven Champeon | January 28th, 2003

Happy New Year!

Philosopher Bertrand Russell said that "War does not determine who is right - only who is left." For web designers and developers, it's been browser wars that have made our lives very difficult. In some ways, those difficulties have sent less committed web creators running into the night. Those of us ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | December 31st, 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.

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