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]

Organization

The Web Standards Project is currently (July 2008) led by Derek Featherstone, Aaron Gustafson, and Glenda Sims^[2]

Previous leaders are:

• George Olsen (1998-1999)
• Jeffrey Zeldman (1999-2002)
• Molly Holzschlag (2002-2006)
• Kimberly Blessing and Drew McLellan (2006-2008)

There are members that are invited to work on ad hoc initiatives, the Buzz Blog and other content areas of the site.^[2]

Task forces

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.

Adobe Task Force

Focuses on improving web standards compliance in products from Adobe. Was named the Dreamweaver Task Force until 2008-03-10.^[3]

Education Task Force

Works with institutions of higher education to promote instruction of Web standards and standards-compliant public sites.

Microsoft Task Force

Works with the Internet Explorer and Web platform tools team.

Accessibility Task Force

Works with organizations, vendors and others to promote Web accessibility.

International Liaison Group

A member is "an active advocate for Web standards and best practices either in their country of origin or domicile."^[4]

The Street Team

Organizing community events to promote web standards.

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.

Activities

• The Acid2 test allows browsers and other rendering engines to test compliance with CSS 1 and 2 specifications.
• The Acid3 test allows browsers and other rendering engines to test compliance with CSS 2.1, DOM and EcmaScript specifications.

References

External links

• The Web Standards Project
• The Web Standards Project Education Task Force

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