Web Standards Project

Last updated
Web Standards Project
Company typeProject
Industry Information technology
Founded1998;26 years ago (1998)
FounderGeorge Olsen
Defunct2013
FateDissolution
Key people
 Jeffrey Zeldman, Tim Bray, Glenn Davis, Steven Champeon, Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, Matt Mullenweg, Molly Holzschlag, Simon Willison, [1] Dave Shea, Christopher Schmitt
Website www.webstandards.org

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies, with a primary focus on web clients (web browsers).

Contents

Founded in 1998, The Web Standards Project campaigned for standards that reduced the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any document published on the Web. WaSP worked with browser companies, authoring tool makers, and peers to encourage them to use these standards, since they "are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users". [2] The group dissolved in 2013.

Organization

The Web Standards Project began as a grassroots coalition "fighting for standards in our [web] browsers" founded by George Olsen, Glenn Davis, and Jeffrey Zeldman in August 1998. [3] By 2001, the group had achieved its primary goal of persuading Microsoft, Netscape, Opera, and other browser makers to accurately and completely support HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0, CSS1, and ECMAScript. Had browser makers not been persuaded to do so, the Web would likely have fractured into pockets of incompatible content, with various websites available only to people who possessed the right browser. In addition to streamlining web development and significantly lowering its cost, support for common web standards enabled the development of the semantic web. By marking up content in semantic (X)HTML, front-end developers make a site's content more available to search engines, more accessible to people with disabilities, and more available to the world beyond the desktop (e.g. mobile).

The project relaunched in June 2002 with new members, a redesigned website, new site features, and a redefined mission focused on developer education and standards compliance in authoring tools as well as browsers. [4]

Project leaders were:

There were members that were invited to work on ad hoc initiatives, the Buzz Blog and other content areas of the site.

The group announced its dissolution on March 1, 2013. [5]

Task forces

The Web Standards Project hosted projects focused on bringing relevant organizations closer to standards-compliance, dubbed Task Forces.

Adobe Task Force
Focused on improving web standards compliance in products from Adobe Systems. Was named the Dreamweaver Task Force until 2008-03-10. [6]
Education Task Force
Worked with institutions of higher education to promote instruction of Web standards and standards-compliant public sites.
Microsoft Task Force
Worked with the Internet Explorer and Web platform tools team.
Accessibility Task Force
Worked with organizations, vendors and others to promote Web accessibility.
International Liaison Group
A member was "an active advocate for Web standards and best practices either in their country of origin or domicile." [7]
The Street Team
Organized community events to promote web standards.
DOM Scripting Task Force
Focused on interoperable client-side scripting, through explaining and promoting the DOM standards from W3C and the ECMAScript Standard, and concepts like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, accessibility, standards-driven JavaScript. [8] These best practice approaches have been called "DOM scripting" to differentiate them from earlier perceived bad uses of "Dynamic HTML". The task force became inactive before the group disbanded.

Activities

Browse Happy

Browse Happy is a website urging users to upgrade their web browsers. The site was initially created by the Web Standards Project in August 2004 to convince users to switch to a web browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. [9] It focused on security issues in Internet Explorer and suggested four alternatives: Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome. The core of the site was a collection of testimonials by people who had switched from Internet Explorer to alternative web browsers. [10]

In June 2005, the Web Standards Project decided that an anti-Internet Explorer campaign did not fit with their mission, and they handed the site over to Matt Mullenweg. [11] The site is now[ specify ] maintained by WordPress.com [12] with collaboration from HTML5 Boilerplate team members.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Document Object Model</span> Convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML, and XML documents

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an HTML or XML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree; with them one can change the structure, style or content of a document. Nodes can have event handlers attached to them. Once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KHTML</span> Discontinued web browser engine

KHTML is a discontinued browser engine that was developed by the KDE project. It originated as the engine of the Konqueror browser in the late 1990s, but active development ceased in 2016. It was officially discontinued in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Zeldman</span> American entrepreneur and web designer

Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and co-founded the A Book Apart imprint and the design conference An Event Apart.

Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

Trident is a proprietary browser engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer, developed by Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molly Holzschlag</span> American computer scientist (1963–2023)

Molly Miriam Esther Holzschlag was an American author, lecturer and advocate of the Open Web. She wrote or co-authored 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web. She was nicknamed the "Fairy Godmother of the Web".

The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource "built to demonstrate what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design." It launched in May 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acid2</span> Online HTML rendering test

Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla Application Suite</span> Discontinued Internet suite

The Mozilla Application Suite is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It was based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation from 2003 to 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progressive enhancement</span> Web design strategy putting emphasis web content first

Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. This strategy speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as text on a page is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently, meaning content ready for consumption "out of the box" is served immediately, and not behind additional layers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YUI Library</span>

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a discontinued open-source JavaScript library for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML, and DOM scripting. YUI includes several cores CSS resources. It is available under a BSD License. Development on YUI began in 2005 and Yahoo! properties such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! front page began using YUI in the summer of that year. YUI was released for public use in February 2006. It was actively developed by a core team of Yahoo! engineers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flash of unstyled content</span> Phenomenon in web browsers

A flash of unstyled content is an instance where a web page appears briefly with the browser's default styles prior to loading an external CSS stylesheet, due to the web browser engine rendering the page before all information is retrieved. The page corrects itself as soon as the style rules are loaded and applied; however, the shift may be distracting. Related problems include flash of invisible text and flash of faux text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acid3</span> Online HTML rendering test

The Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript.

In computing, version targeting is a technique that allows a group of users to use some advanced software features that were introduced in a particular software version while allowing users accustomed to the prior versions to still use the same software as if the new features were never added to the software. It is a way to ensure backward compatibility when new software features would otherwise break it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CSS HTML Validator</span> HTML editor and CSS editor for Windows

CSS HTML Validator is an HTML editor and CSS editor for Windows that helps web developers create syntactically correct and accessible HTML/HTML5, XHTML, and CSS documents by locating errors, potential problems like browser compatibility issues, and common mistakes. It is also able to check links, check spelling, suggest improvements, alert developers to deprecated, obsolete, or proprietary tags, attributes, and CSS properties, and find issues that can affect search engine optimization.

A browser speed test is a computer benchmark that scores the performance of a web browser, by measuring the browser's efficiency in completing a predefined list of tasks. In general the testing software is available online, located on a website, where different algorithms are loaded and performed in the browser client. Typical test tasks are rendering and animation, DOM transformations, string operations, mathematical calculations, sorting algorithms, graphic performance tests and memory instructions. Browser speed tests have been used during browser wars to prove superiority of specific web browsers. The popular Acid3 test is no particular speed test but checks browser conformity to web standards.

WebPlatform.org was a community-edited documentation website spun off by W3C. It sought to create a vendor-neutral online reference of Web platform standards. The project was a collaboration among Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera Software, and W3C, who were called "stewards" of the WebPlatform project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EdgeHTML</span> Browser engine of Microsoft Edge (2015–2021)

EdgeHTML is a proprietary browser engine from Microsoft that was formerly used in Microsoft Edge, which debuted in 2015 as part of Windows 10.

References

  1. ↑ Cederholm, Dan (2004-06-10). Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook . Berkeley: Apress. p.  236. ISBN   978-1-59059-381-3.
  2. ↑ "WaSP: Fighting for Standards (WaSP mission statement)". Web Standards Project. 2006. Retrieved 2008-03-10.
  3. ↑ Sliwa, Carol (1998-08-17). "Browser standards targeted". Computerworld. Vol. 32, no. 33. p. 76. ISSN   0010-4841.
  4. ↑ Pruitt, Scarlet (2002-06-12). "Web Standards Project aims to educate developers". InfoWorld.
  5. ↑ Gustafson, Aaron (2013-03-01). "Our Work Here is Done". The Web Standards Project. Retrieved 2019-04-09.
  6. ↑ Announcing the Adobe Task Force - The Web Standards Project
  7. ↑ "ILG Members - The Web Standards Project". webstandards.org.
  8. ↑ "Manifesto - The Web Standards Project". webstandards.org.
  9. ↑ Festa, Paul (2004-08-24). "Browser campaign slams IE". CNET News. Archived from the original on 2008-10-07. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
  10. ↑ heise - "Glücklich browsen" ohne Internet Explorer - Staff Writer - 25.08.2004
  11. ↑ BrowseHappy Now Part of WordPress as WaSP Refocuses Mission - Molly E. Holzschlag - Archived 2005-08-22 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ↑ "Browse Happy". GitHub . 7 September 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.