Web Standards Project
| Project | |
| Industry | Information technology |
| Fate | Dissolved |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Founder | George Olsen |
| Defunct | 2013 |
|
Key people
|
Jeffrey Zeldman |
| 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.
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". In 2013 the project was closed.
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 1998. 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).
Founding members of the project moved on in 2002 but continued to evangelize web standards to design and business audiences. In this period, the Web Standards Project became primarily an educational organization.
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 own dissolution in a Buzz Blog post on March 1, 2013.
The Web Standards Project hosted projects focused on bringing relevant organizations closer to standards-compliance, dubbed Task Forces.
The DOM Scripting task force became inactive before the group disbanded. Its purpose was to focus 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 and unobtrusive scripting. These best practice approaches have been called DOM scripting to differentiate them from earlier perceived bad uses of DHTML.
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