June 11, 2002
9:04 AM   Subscribe

The Web Standards Project is back, now in easy-to-swallow blog form. Stand up straight! Close that HTML tag! And wipe that silly browser off your hard drive, mister! And the other one.
posted by gazingus (17 comments total)
 
And all this time I thought WASP stood for White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Silly me.

The fact that WaSP actually has to launch a campaign to get people to upgrade their browsers is a testament to the laziness and stupidity of users.
posted by insomnyuk at 9:08 AM on June 11, 2002


Heh, anyone else get an error trying to access the xml version of their site?
posted by bobo123 at 9:27 AM on June 11, 2002


Remember that the WaSP is just as much about accessibility as it is about IA, layout, and design. While it's easy to rail at "stupid lazy" users for not upgrading, part of the web standards initiative means that coders still have a responsibility to make their markup accessible even to the stupid and lazy old-browser-users.

(Accessible, but not necessarily pretty. ;)

Sorry, I sounded like a stodgy lecturer for a moment there. Someone kick me.
posted by brownpau at 9:32 AM on June 11, 2002


(hoping AOLTW goes with the Mozilla-based browser for the next version of AOL to bring more publicity to the idea that the web is more than IE users on a Windows-based desktop computer sporting a 800x600 width screen and activeX controls)
posted by jragon at 10:02 AM on June 11, 2002


I'm not happy with the nav...the sub menu item indent looks more like a formating problem than a distinction from the root items.

All in all it's a nice Macromedia site.
posted by dangerman at 10:47 AM on June 11, 2002


[ot]
/me is hoping that AOLTW just stoops to offer plain old DUN access cheap, and lets us use what browser we bloody well want. :D
[/ot]
posted by brownpau at 10:58 AM on June 11, 2002


Heh, anyone else get an error trying to access the xml version of their site?

Should be fixed - we have Movable Type setup to auto-encode apostrophes and quotes into character entities....but somehow that auto-encoding didn't transfer to our RSS feed :)
posted by bkdelong at 12:04 PM on June 11, 2002


Hi! It's me! Holloway! Posting in a thread about WaSP!
(Accessible, but not necessarily pretty. ;)
Yeah - the usability does get impared.
posted by holloway at 1:06 PM on June 11, 2002


The fact that WaSP actually has to launch a campaign to get people to upgrade their browsers is a testament to the laziness and stupidity of users.

Yeah! My stupid, lazy grandmother really should get her stupid, lazy, 75-year-old ass in gear and download all 10-15 MBs of IE6 on her dial-up, which only does about 4K/s throughput, so she can be standards-compliant. I mean, Jesus Christ, how can she be so stupid? Doesn't she keep up with the latest technology? Doesn't she care about the state of the web?

Oh, wait. She doesn't. She just wants to check her stocks on Yahoo and maybe read my website.

It isn't always about stupidity and laziness, insomnyuk.
posted by starvingartist at 1:46 PM on June 11, 2002


There are many people that could care less about standards, browser versions, and your various xml, rss, css, BS. Their audience will only be like-minded developers and bloggers. You don't even have to pull out old Grandma examples when most of folks don't care. Hell, I know all about it and I don't care.

As a web developer you either cater to your audience or you suffer from people not being able to see your site. A standards body needs to get all the developers on the same page and what a great thing that would be, but they can never expect to anything from the end user.
posted by john at 2:13 PM on June 11, 2002


I still find it a delicious irony that I'm unable to read most of the text on that site when I browse from work. I'm sure it's because I've gone and messed with something I shouldn't have, but it tickles me nonetheless to see gobbledygook on the webstandards page.
posted by stefanie at 4:15 PM on June 11, 2002


I guess all that "restructing" time was spent on figuring out how to install Movable Type?
posted by teradome at 8:53 AM on June 12, 2002


bah. "restructuring." YKWIM.
posted by teradome at 8:58 AM on June 12, 2002


Hi, all. I wanted to jump in and ask about any problems that you may have had (aside from the RSS feed, which isn't a feed of the whole site, merely of the weblog alone, and which was fixed a few hours after we launched). I see that at least one person here (stefanie) is having problems - what sort of problems? Can you send me a screenshot? What browser are you using? Details will help. (I hope that the snarky tone was just the result of a bad day, and not some irrational hatred of something we intended to be helpful and educational...)

The site is all valid XHTML Strict, using CSS for presentation, and uses no tables for layout; it should (and, from what we've been able to figure out, does) degrade successfully all the way down to any browser capable of supporting the Host: HTTP header. The text should be legible and the presentation clear, regardless of your platform or browser. We've only had one report of poor display that was accompanied by a screenshot, and that from a buggy beta version of OmniWeb (4.1). From our testing, it looks as good in lynx and EudoraWeb as it does in Mozilla or Chimera or IE.

We really want the site to be useful to you, especially to Web developers, and are welcome to feedback on how we can best achieve that goal.

As for the browser upgrade remarks, I'll just say that if you think that the Web Standards Project is just about getting IE6 on the desktop of every man Jack, you may want to take a closer look. Start at the "Learn" section. We've shifted our focus from beating up vendors and asking people to upgrade, to celebrating the achievements of the past few years and trying to help Web developers understand the importance, power, and flexibility of valid markup and stylesheets, to help them take advantage of the tools they now have at their disposal.

And hey, installing MT was the easy part. It's getting the Steering Committee to use it that was the real hassle ;)

Looking forward to your comments,
Steve
Web Standards Project Steering Committe
posted by schampeo at 11:38 PM on June 13, 2002


The new WaSP site is fantastic; exponentially better than the old orange design with the bgimages. It's my new reference standard for CSS implementation. Really nice job.
posted by johnnyace at 3:16 AM on June 14, 2002


Bravo, Steve.

(Hi! Holloway! It's me! Posting in a thread about WaSP! ;)
posted by rory at 3:51 AM on June 14, 2002


Hi folks. The "restructuring" actually involved enlarging WaSP's
strategic focus to encompass educational outreach and working
with authoring tool manufacturers. In other words, it involved a
rethinking of the group's mission along with actions to back it,
such as the Dreamweaver Task Force that helped improve standards
compliance in Dreamweaver MX, and the development of a
still-growing educational section of the site.

It also involved doubling the size of the steering committee,
tasking new members with the development of strategy, content,
and design, and developing processes to avoid committee-itis when
working as a much larger group.

90% of WaSP's work has always taken place behind the scenes - in
meetings with browser and tool makers, in letters sent to the
right people at the right times. It was never about the site,
whether orange or white, and it still isn't - though the new site
does provide useful things the old one lacked and also works as a
test case for the methods used in its development.

The group blog is simply one small change, and that change is
mainly about including new news authors. The old site also had a
front-page BUZZ section, but that old BUZZ section had fewer
authors.
posted by Zeldman at 6:31 AM on June 14, 2002


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