The Web Standards Project (WaSP) Shuttered

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.'"

Comments

congrats

[noh8rz10]

they won. time to move on, find a new way to improve the world.

Re:congrats

[otuz]

No, browsers nowadays are the least incompatible ever, and it becomes better year by year, when outdated IE versions drop off the considerable target lists. Getting rid of IE 6 was one of the greatest milestones of a decade, soon to be followed by IE 7 and IE 8.

does that mean ACID4 is cancelled?

[Trepidity]

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?

Re:does that mean ACID4 is cancelled?

[AaronGustafson]

We were hoping ACID4 would come together under our leadership, but we could not get it to materialize.

Time to form the MWaSP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Time to form the MWaSP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Time to form the MWaSP

[TeXMaster]

Problem is no browser follows exactly the standards, and as you point with Office every browser has bugs in it. So if you markup your page following the standards alone it won't render properly anywhere. You end up going back and rewriting some of the styling and scripting to either not use stuff that expose bugs or using browser-specific kludges to get around the bugs.

If all browsers use the same engine, at least we don't have to spend days testing pages with umpteen different browsers and getting around gumpteen bugs. And if one engine is used, wouldn't that become the de-facto standard? The trick is that the engine must be open-sourced (unlike MS Office), so that it's not controlled by a single commercial company and that bugs can be fixed by anyone at the RC stage.

The problem is that, with that kind of attitude, rendering issues in browsers will never be fixed. Even if the rendering engine is crap, and the standard claims a different (more sensible, more functional, whatever) behavior, with a single rendering engine used as the de facto standard, it would never get fixed. Unsurprisingly, whenever one reports a rendering bug, the first question that gets asked is: does it work in other engines? Luckily, we still have at least three major engines (the fourth, Presto, has only been recently abandoned), so we can still compare and see which engines are wrong in implementing that specific part of the standard, and which are not. Without these multitude of implementations, one of the primary motivation in fixing bugs disappears.

Monocultures are bad. Regardless of whether they're open-source or not.

Re:Time to form the MWaSP

[RabidReindeer]

Developers rarely intentionally write web pages so that they follow the standard, they just aim for that it works on web browsers.

I must be an exception, then. I'm not very good at the artistic aspect of web page design. My speciality is the back-end. Since I'm not dealing with the in-and-out quirks of browsers and web pages every day, I don't have them memorized and I do my work by referencing the standards documents. Then and only then do I start tweaking for browsers.

Re:Time to form the MWaSP

[davester666]

It's open source. It only 'dies' if everybody stops using it, or everybody takes their own private branch and stops taking/submitting fixes to the project.

And webkit is only a part of a browser. Chrome and Safari are both based on it, but look, work and implement a different set of features. Opera's new browser based on webkit will have a third set of features, different from both Chrome and Safari. If everyone were to switch tomorrow to using it, we'd still have to test our work in each browser to make sure it still works properly in each one.

Homogeneity would (IMHO) help, assuming it is standards based. If you can go "I tried it in the browser, and the browser works to the standard, and my stuff didn't work right", then you can go "I need to fix my work" [bugs in the browser notwithstanding].

Great work

[Lisias]

I'm sure they will be remembered, but hopefully not missed! :-)

WaSP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they ever explain what the "a" stood for?

Re:WaSP?

[Anonymous Coward]

it stood for "our acronym wouldn't be as cool without it"

Re:WaSP?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We Are Sexual Perverts", "We All Smoke Pot," "We Are Satan's People," "We Are Satan's Preachers," take your pick. When asked directly Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P answered "We Ain't Sure, Pal."

Re:"shuttered"?

[oodaloop]

It'll probably be one of your vocabulary words in high school. Grown ups use this word a lot!

Encrypted Media Extensions

[devent]

Too bad the W3C is now working on DRM for the web.
Encrypted Media Extensions

It is not possible to have an open web and have DRMed content. You cannot give me the keys and the encryption scheme and to expect DRM to work.

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard
The BBC Petitions the W3C to Implement DRM for HTML5

It's just like Flash or Silverlight but with the blessing of the W3C.
Open source browsers and open source systems like Linux cannot support the Encrypted Media Extensions, without binary blobs.

Re:Thirteen more months of IE 8

[KiloByte]

Once Windows XP dies in April 2014

Why would it "die"? I don't see Vista, 7 or 8 used anywhere but on laptops. At least around here, companies replace the buggers on new computers with XP, for several reasons (valid or not).

They notoriously don't run updates (thank Microsoft for regression) so nothing will change when support is dropped.

Let's hope Microsoft kills Windows completely (like it does with 8) before companies finally decide to move on :)

Re:"shuttered"?

[gargleblast]

I do not think it means what I think it means.