molly.com

Tuesday 29 March 2005

What’s Up with WaSP

WHAT’S UP WITH WaSP? Maybe we built a hive in your garage, or perhaps we stung you in an unsightly spot. We are truly sorry. We really promised to be a kinder and gentler kind of WaSP. But then again some of my country’s presidents promised the same thing.

So let me wake up from my nap and tell you this: WaSP is buzzing about. Yes, as is typical to our nature, we stung a few folks while breaking out of our hive, but we’ve cooled off now, and look at all the stuff that’s going on as a result of recent activity:

  • Acid2 Task Force. The acid2 test is for all web browsers seeking to check CSS 2 compliance. WaSP is hosting this test. Browsers, start your rendering engines . . . here we go!
  • Macromedia Dreamweaver Task Force. The Macromedia Dreamweaver Task Force is revitalized and the focus is standards and accessibility all the way. Look forward to some amazing developments from Macromedia and this group.
  • Assistive Device / Accessibility Task Force. The group whose time has been long overdue.
  • Microsoft Task Force. Microsoft and WaSP representatives in a round-table discussion about the next generation of Microsoft software. Thank you Robert Scoble.
  • Emergent Technologies Study Group. A group of WaSPs are forming to study and report on emergent (oh, okay, and re-emergent technologies) like XMLHttpRequest and report back findings. Look for Drew McLelland, Simon Willison and others to be heading up this initiative.

Other groups at work at WaSP:

  • The Mobile Task Force. Dedicated to documenting mobile and alternative device development.
  • The CMS Task Force: An upcoming group documenting and working with CMS developers to assist in the support and implementation of web standards within CMS products.

What do you want to see at WaSP? Answer here.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 12:36 | Comments (25)

Comments (25)

  1. Tony says Tuesday 29 March 2005 at 21:32

    How are developers being chosen for the CMS task force?

  2. Molly says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 00:31

    Tony: Are you working on a CMS? If you are, let me know in email.

  3. Ian Lloyd says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 01:04

    Molly, thanks for breaking the WaSP posting drought!

  4. Molly says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 01:39

    Thanks Ian – but usually you’re the WaSP posting God. 🙂

  5. Molly says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 02:06

    Steven, I think there are about 37 of us now. I’m glad to hear the news has you tingling. There will be much more news generated out of this as we progress in our work. I promise we’ll keep you posted.

  6. Martin Reurings says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 03:07

    I’m personally much more interrested in the Assistive Device / Accessibility Task Force, I’m looking to build a web for everyone not just the insane few that hold all the cards.
    Where might I learn more of this taskforce?

  7. Robby says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 05:36

    >Acid2 Task Force. The acid2 test is for all web browsers seeking to check CSS 2.0 compliance. WaSP is hosting this test. Browsers, start your rendering engines . . . here we go!

    I hope you mean 2.1 compliance. In some areas the differences in the spec is pretty large, and should be the test base.

  8. Davezilla says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 07:15

    This can only be a good thing, Molly.

  9. Isofarro says Wednesday 30 March 2005 at 08:06

    Any way for us plebs to get involved? I’m interested in seeing what happens with the combination of accessibility working group and emergent technologies (well, accessible javascript really).

    The Acid2 test will be extremely useful in pushing CSS adoption ahead again. Not really my thing, but has my support and best wishes.

  10. Trails says Thursday 31 March 2005 at 15:56

    More of a “keep up the good work” as opposed to request.

    I think one of the biggest services offered by WaSP is the updates on larger-scale sites which are switching over. This is highly beneficial when trying to convince non technical executives of a fairly conservative organisation that web standards and css are the way to go.

  11. Jens Wedin says Friday 1 April 2005 at 01:34

    Excellent, good to see things happening.

  12. Gérard Talbot says Saturday 2 April 2005 at 04:05

    What I’d like to see is a task force exclusively and specifically oriented at helping out converting technical+developer websites into valid HTML.
    Examples of technical+developer websites which fail by a lot validation:

    – all examples of w3school.com: no doctype decl., some ,

    , etc.. and these examples eventually end up into webpages
    – http://www.devx.com/ : 334 errors today in transitional)
    – http://www.wdvl.com/ : 156 errors today;
    http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/HTML/Standards/ : 157 errors
    – http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ : 94 errors today; the code of their examples is usually quite poor and gets copied a lot in websites.

    There are hundreds of technical websites out there which fail markup and CSS validation by a lot.
    http://www.infoworld.com/ : 797 errors today

    Also HTML editors often provide sets of javascript functions and/or HTML templates which have markup errors or CSS errors. E.g.: Coffeecup HTML Editor 2005E (current version) provides DHTML code which fails validation; CSS code has errors. So these end up on the web thousands of times.

  13. Simon Rönnqvist says Friday 8 April 2005 at 11:48

    Funny synchronicity… a few days after you wrote this I actually thought that it’d be good if WaSP could try to stimulate the development and use of standards compliant CMS-solutions (sometimes including WYSIWYG-editors). I’d love to hear some news about the The CMS Task Force soon.

    One thing that would be useful is a catalog over CMS-solutions (in a broad sence, including i.e. forums) which support standards well. Also add-ons to improve standards compliance of other CMS:es could be included. Some kind of rating/reviewing of compliance would be cool.

    From one thing to another… I’m actually doing a thesis on separation of content and presentation when using a CMS with an WYSIWYG-editor. It seems like I’m going to analyse to what extent the Bitflux Editor http://bitfluxeditor.org/ manages to support separation of content and presentation. It seems to be the WYSIWYG which does the best job (at least among the opensource ones).

    But one problem remains, since it doesn’t touch the CSS it’d sometimes force the user to choose silly class names such as floatRight or floatLeft, which kind of hurts the separation of content and presentation. This aricle could give some ideas to how this problem could be adressed: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/integrating_css_with_cms/

    BTW. Synchronicity again… a few months after this Digital Web Magazine article was written I happened to think of about the same idea and I even came up with the same silly acronym PMS (Presentation Management System). Funny how we tend to think we come up with ideas, but it seems like we’re all parts of the same brains. 🙂 Next time you come up with something, try googling for it…

  16. ceren moray says Thursday 17 January 2008 at 02:13

    Excellent, good to see things happening.
    Thanks

  17. Kurtlar Vadisi says Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 02:45

    BTW. Synchronicity again…

  19. antalya otelleri says Thursday 5 June 2008 at 04:43

    thank you antalya otelleri

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