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.'"

congrats

[noh8rz10]

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

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:Time to form the MWaSP

[davester666]

What exactly do MS and Mozilla bring to the web that they can't do within WebKit? They can have different Javascript engines, implement different UI, have different 'extensions' to HTML [attributes, elements, css features, etc].

Homogeneity is NOT bad for the web. Having developers need to test their site on a bazillion different browsers is NOT a good thing. Having users switch from one browser to another, and have the same page do slightly different things or work slightly differently is NOT a good thing.

What WAS bad was having a single company intentionally implement their so-called web browser so it worked differently from everyone else's and even against the standard at the time.

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.

Encrypted Media Extensions

[devent]

Too bad the W3C is now working on DRM for the web.
Encrypted Media Extensions [w3.org]

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 [boingboing.net]
The BBC Petitions the W3C to Implement DRM for HTML5 [goodereader.com]

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.