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Buzz Archives: Web Standards (general)

There Are Standards, and Then There Are Standards …

What are standards? Well, as far as the WaSP is concerned, ‘web standards’ are a whole bunch of interrelated standards that form the basis of most of the web pages that you visit every day: HTML/XHTML, CSS, DOM, ECMAScript and so on. These are all documented and owned by the W3C and serve as a reference point for anyone and everyone who wants to conform to the standards. But these are not the only standards …

By Ian Lloyd | October 15th, 2003

Mobile Graphics Contest, W3C

A Mobile Graphics with Standards contest is currently running at the World Wide Web Consortium. Announced September 30th, 2003 by the SVG working group at the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) the SVG Mobile Competition is underway. There is still time to submit entries, though the deadline is November 3, 2003. The challenge: ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | October 14th, 2003

We Are the Standard!

I'm often hearing people at my place of work talk about doing things to Microsoft's standards, and am very quick to point out that there is not a 'Microsoft standard' as such - there are agreed standards (or 'recommendations' to use the correct term) laid down by the W3C to ...

By Ian Lloyd | October 10th, 2003

Standards Benefit Business

New or old, reading or reviewing the benefits of using standards for business, developers/designers, and users may give many extra incentives or ideas about how to help promote change or learn why it is important. On September 18, 2003 Jeffrey Veen offered up an essay The Business Value of ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | September 29th, 2003

Client-side XSLT is bad for accessibility

Ian Hickson, who was a standards guru before you were a standards newbie, talks about the problems with client-side XSLT. This is a technique which is supposedly supported by all modern browsers -- at least, all modern graphical browsers. But in this case, there is no fallback provided ...

By Mark Pilgrim | September 29th, 2003

You Mean There’s More to Life than Web Standards?

Shock, horror! Some people out there think that 'Web Standards' are not the single most important thing to worry about when crafting a web page or site. Well, I can certainly see the argument here: Web standards can help, and go hand-in-hand with everything else that makes a site ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 26th, 2003

TBL on the Future of the Web

If you missed Tim Berners-Lee's lecture to the Royal Society, The Future of the World Wide Web, that was webcast earlier this week, it's now available on demand. (Requires RealPlayer plug-in.) He starts out by examining how we got to where we are today and then moves on to look ...

By Porter Glendinning | September 25th, 2003

Just Some Stuff About Web Standards

This is one of those 'clearing out your bookmarks/favourites' type posts - a selection of useful articles spotted over the last few days: CSS-Based Design - Jeremy Keith of Adactio puts up his notes from the Skillswap talk he gave back in March (better late than never, and it's ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 23rd, 2003

ISO Plans Could Harm Web

While everyone is trying to take in the implications of the Eolas vs Microsoft case, there are other clouds forming on the horizon that could either develop into a full-blown hurricane or dissipate quietly. Over-dramatic? Only time will tell. The cause of this storm - a tentative proposal from the ...

By Ian Lloyd | September 22nd, 2003

Where’s the Money, Honey?

Today over at Adaptive Path Jeff Veen makes the case for converting to standards compliant, semantically expressive site production. Many points are left out because of the need for brevity, but at the close of the essay Veen makes an important point: when design and development communities can quantify a ...

By Ben Henick | September 18th, 2003

Gearing up: a few odds and ends

Those of you who have an interest in RDF as a W3C-sponsored complement to RSS and Echo should note that on Friday the W3C released six Working Drafts related to RDF. Elsewhere, tomorrow and Tuesday the WaSP’s Molly Holzschlag will make a number of standards-focussed presentations at Seybold SF, and will ...

By Ben Henick | September 7th, 2003

Device independence and its challenges

The W3C Device Independence Working Group has published two new Working Group Notes: Device Independence Principles describes Web access "anytime and anyhow" from user, authoring and delivery perspectives. Authoring Challenges for Device Independence are considerations and implications for building universally accessible Web content and applications.

By Steph Troeth | September 3rd, 2003

Aural Pleasure

In an eloquent radio interview for National Public Radio (NPR), Paul Ford of ftrain describes the evolution of Web standards. What's especially interesting is that Paul uses descriptions of human language as a metaphor for the merging of various Web standards. He carries the metaphor through very well, and as ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | August 8th, 2003

Postcard Tips

This is an alternative way to get the message out. Matt Robinsion developed the Wish You Were Here pages : a small site designed to advocate modern web design practice, with tips for web designers. Tips are arranged or grouped in categories from Design(Making your site attractive and ...

By Holly Marie Koltz | August 7th, 2003

Getting it

Quoted in a recent ZDnet article:“[Now that Microsoft has announced the end of standalone versions of Internet Explorer,] people will think, ‘are the applications I'm writing for the browser browser-agnostic, or are they IE applications—which makes them Windows applications?’ If I want an application to run on a Linux desktop ...

By Chris Kaminski | July 24th, 2003

Some men you just can’t reach

Bucking the trend towards browser-neutral, standards-based web development, Buy.com's new music site, BuyMusic.com, requires Internet Explorer for Windows. Browser-specific development. How quaint. Did I miss the time-warp back to 1995?

By Chris Kaminski | July 23rd, 2003

Eric talks standards, Dave browses for bugs

"The criticism that CSS websites have looked plain is really well deserved but the reason that CSS driven sites have looked plain to date is that the people who have created those sites have not been visual artists they haven't ...

By Ian Lloyd | July 7th, 2003

Walking the talk

There are a growing number of resources available which appeal to the selfishness of the individual designer or producer in selling the advantages of Web standards, but concise case studies and finished, live sites built around standards are still something of a rarity. Simon Willison points out today a case study ...

By Ben Henick | June 15th, 2003

Setting the Record Straight

In a recent interview with Jeffrey Zeldman, Meet the Maker's Brian Alvey complains that his role in WaSP “always gets overlooked.” Zeldman suggests that Alvey just might be overestimating his influence, but despite that lil' snipe, goes on to set the record straight about the history of WaSP and ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | June 8th, 2003

The World Wide List of Web Standards Blogs

Ed Nixon, along with denizens of the W3C's Web Standards Evangelism list, have put together an outstanding international web standardards & accessibility blog resource (link no longer available).

By Molly E. Holzschlag | May 12th, 2003

We do declare:

If the ESPN and Wired redesigns (among others) are factors encouraging you to develop standards-compliant sites, visits to the W3C QA Interest Group article about standards compliant development techniques and their full list of valid DOCTYPE declarations are must-reads.

By Ben Henick | April 30th, 2003

The Business Benefits of Web Standards

From DevEdge: More with less seems to be the mission impossible for web designers: Addressing more customers, a broader audience, more diversity in terms of browsers, more accessibility, users asking for more speed, while spending less to maintain or redesign a web site. Caught between a rock and a hard ...

By Meryl K. Evans | March 28th, 2003

Parlez-vous standards?

There's a new resource on the web for French-speaking developers with an interest in supporting web standards. Openweb has finally been unleashed by standards advocate Tristan Nitot, and offers a wealth of information about W3C technologies including XHTML, CSS, the DOM and web accessibility. The site includes links to the usual ...

By Ian Lloyd | March 21st, 2003

R.I.P. glasshaus, Peer

For all those who enjoyed books from glasshaus, Wrox, and Friends of Ed, it's time to pay respects and wave goodbye. Parent company, Peer Information, has gone completely belly-up. So, staff members are now out of jobs, authors are out of future creative opportunities (not to mention royalties), and we ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | March 14th, 2003

Pushing the Edge

Netscape DevEdge revamps their design and front-end structure. In the process, the site itself becomes another beacon demonstrating the possibilities and advantages to be had when web standards and compliant browsers get pushed to their limits. Tableless layout, major accessibility enhancements, CSS dropdown menus (with a minor assist from JavaScript), ...

By Doug Bowman | February 13th, 2003

SVG 1.1 now a Recommendation

The W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics 1.1 Specification made it to full Recommendation status this week. This version incorporates the errata from SVG 1.0 and breaks the Spec up into modules that can be used as building blocks for creating focused language profiles. Along with SVG 1.1, two such profiles for mobile ...

By Porter Glendinning | January 18th, 2003

Counting Down One More Time On W3C Patent Policy

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Call For Comments phase of the latest World Wide Web Consortium Patent Policy Working Draft. Needless to say, this version - based on royalty-free licensing - is perceived as more agreeable than its predecessor, which was based on a reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing model.

By Ben Henick | December 30th, 2002

Getting the Last Word

Web standards gets the last word in an article written by Grant Butler for Globe Technology News. While best for those readers with a general rather than deep awareness of web standards, the article, All Browser Code Not Created Equal, is noteworthy because it explains in easy terms some ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | December 14th, 2002

Another Hall-of-Shame Entry

Check out Aventis - but only if you're running IE6 or Netscape 7. Their challenge, they say is life; on the evidence the challenges include basic standards citizenship. On a sidenote, once you do get into this site, the baroque menu structure is a good argument for some of the ...

By Tim Bray | December 2nd, 2002

Scalable Vector Graphics Moving Right Along

The W3C has promoted both SVG 1.1 and the SVG Mobile Profiles Tiny & Basic to Proposed Recommendation status, and has also published the first Working Draft of SVG 1.2. In addition, a great set of tables has been published showing how 15 different SVG implementations fared when run ...

By Porter Glendinning | November 17th, 2002

Another invalid relaunch fixed

The AltaVista search engine relaunched today with a new design, but the spare interface doesn’t use valid markup. No DOCTYPE, even. Sad. As Eric Meyer did with KPMG and Dylan Foley did with MSN, Trip Kirkpatrick has taken it upon himself to fix AltaVista’s markup, showing how easy it would ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | November 12th, 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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