| Type | Project |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web design |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Founder(s) | George Olsen |
| Key people | Jeffrey Zeldman |
| Website | www.webstandards.org |
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is 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 campaigns for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any document published on the Web. WaSP works 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".[1]
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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.
The Web Standards Project is now primarily an educational organization and is currently (July 2011) led by Derek Featherstone, Aaron Gustafson, and Glenda Sims[2]
Previous project leaders were:
There are members that are invited to work on ad hoc initiatives, the Buzz Blog and other content areas of the site.[2]
The Web Standards Project also hosts projects focused on bringing relevant organizations closer to standards-compliance, dubbed Task Forces. By working with the larger organizations providing common tools to internet users, they are impacting the progress of standards adoption in the most effective way possible.
The DOM Scripting task force, although still listed on WaSP's website, is not active any more.[5] 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.[6] These best practice approaches have been called DOM scripting to differentiate them from earlier perceived bad uses of DHTML.
Archive: The Web Standards Project's baseline standards proposal
Archive: The Web Standards Project's historical "goodbye" page
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