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The Web Standards Project (WaSP) Shuttered

Posted by samzenpus on from the so-long-farewell-auf-weidersehen-goodbye dept.

hypnosec writes "Aaron Gustafson and two of his fellow contributors, Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth, have announced the closure of The Web Standards Project (WaSP). It was formed back in 1998 by Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman to get browser makers support the open standards established by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The project described itself as a 'coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.' Founded at a time when Microsoft and Netscape were battling it out for browser dominance, WaSP aimed to mitigate the risks arising out of this war – an imminent fragmentation that could lead to browser incompatibilities. Noting that '..Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality' Aaron noted that it was time to 'close down The Web Standards Project.'"

3 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. does that mean ACID4 is cancelled? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Web Standards Project is the organization that put together the ACID, ACID2, and ACID3 browser-compatibility tests. There has been talk for some time of an ACID4 in development. Will that be done via some other group, or is it canned?

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  2. Time to form the MWaSP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Mobile Web Standards Project. Right now, the standard is WebKit. That's not good for the future of the mobile web. Mozilla and even Microsoft have important roles to play. We've seen before that homogeneity is bad for the web, and we should not let it happen to the mobile web.

    1. Re:Time to form the MWaSP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Developers rarely intentionally write web pages so that they follow the standard, they just aim for that it works on web browsers. Standards-compliant website most likely looks good on all web browsers that follow the standards.

      If there's just one web browser engine, websites will start to rely on the behavior of exactly that engine. If there's any ambiguity in the displayed data, the page can break horribly if some other engine tries to display it.

      As an example from another field, Microsoft's Office has reached such monopoly that some documents rely on the rounding errors of floating point calculations. This happens quite easily if you try to squeeze something to fit exactly one page. A "page" is not defined in the data format and pagination is done dynamically, so even small differences in rounding can lead to the document layout breaking. Users won't blame this on the writer of the document, they blame it on the program they use.