Standards
Giving Web Standards a Seat at the Table
In 2007, the web standards project entered the scene once more to push Microsoft to build its most standards-compliant browser to date. Continue reading
Making the Web For Everyone
I talked a bit about the importance of the WWW Wizards Workshop last time in my recap on the importance of 1995, but there was another essential element of that meeting I glossed over a bit. In July of 1993, a few dozen developers huddled together at the O’Reilly offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had… Continue reading
An Early History of Web Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the foundational principles of the World Wide Web. Fighting to preserve that principle are the creators behind the most powerful tools, some of which still exist today. Continue reading
Getting to the Picture Element
The story of how responsive images made its way into the browser doubles as an inside look at the standards making process itself. For some of us on the web, myself counted among them, it was our very first look behind the curtain. Web standards, the rules of CSS and HTML and Javascript that govern… Continue reading
A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter
This article was originally published in CSS-Tricks. In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead: Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal… Continue reading
Almost (Standards) Doesn’t Count
In 2008, the team at Microsoft found themselves in quite the pickle. Let me back up. In 2002, the team at Mozilla found themselves in quite the pickle. Mozilla was the team inside of Netscape that had been spun out as a non-profit to work on Netscape’s browser. Netscape was, in turn, acquired by AOL… Continue reading
The HTML Tags Everybody Hated
It’s easy to forget that HTML, which is an extremely simple programming language, is actually just an exceedingly complex markup language. HTML was one of the original building blocks of the web, and its used by web developers to mark-up (or describe) a page with agreed-upon HTML tags that, when rendered by a browser, spits out a website. The agreed-upon part… Continue reading
Putting Web Accessibility First
Quite frankly, my feeling is that the primary reason why the web is not accessible or not wholly accessible to people with disabilities today is because individuals with disabilities are not considered as part of the core population when we created the web and web sites and even in its initial design. -Mike Paciello The… Continue reading
Tables for Layout? Absurd.
Web designers that cut their teeth in the late 90’s and early 2000’s probably remember table-based layouts. This was a time when some webmasters forced their sites into perfect configuration using HTML data tables, spacer GIF images and a few kindred hacks. But for a while there, there weren’t a whole lot of options in… Continue reading
A Tale of Two Standards
It was 2004, and Ian Hickson had just got out of a W3C workshop organized by Adobe. The topic was how to use web standards to address the growing needs of web applications and developers. Hickson pushed hard to simply extend HTML, the existing markup language of the web, rather than invent something entirely new. Others… Continue reading
The Rise of CSS
The web’s history is filled to the brim with stops and starts and wrong turns. It is a technology that was, after all, designed and built by a shifting and growing community. And every once in a while, that community needs a spark to inspire change. I’d like to point out two such moments, which… Continue reading
The Origin of the IMG Tag
Why is it the <img> tag instead of the <image> tag? The answer, it turns out, dates back to one of the web’s earliest browsers and one of the web’s earliest discussions. Continue reading
