The Web Standards Project

» see webstandards.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, which is the exact year this thing started, and I was on the wrong end of the problem it existed to solve. A page you built would look correct in one browser and collapse in the other, and the standard workaround was to write both versions and sniff the user agent to decide which to serve. Nobody thought this was strange. It was just what the job was.

The Web Standards Project formed in August 1998 out of exactly that frustration. Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded it with Glenn Davis and George Olsen, pulling together a coalition of working designers with no company behind them and no money, whose entire tactic was public pressure: name the browser and name the standard it was breaking, then keep naming it until somebody at Netscape or Microsoft got tired. Their stated goal was narrow. Get the browser makers to support what the W3C had already published.

It worked, slowly, and then it worked completely. By 2001 the browser war was effectively over and WaSP shifted from fighting browsers to fighting authoring tools, working with Macromedia on the code Dreamweaver generated, and then to teaching. By the time it dissolved on 1 March 2013, the thing it had been formed to demand was simply the default behavior of every browser on every platform, including phones that did not exist when it started.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The specific enemy in 1998 was Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4, both of which had spent the previous two years inventing HTML elements at each other until their 4.0 releases were largely incompatible. Aaron Gustafson's closing post describes it as advancing HTML to the point of collapse, which is the correct phrase for it. WaSP's argument was economic before it was aesthetic: fragmentation doubles the cost of building a site, and anything that doubles the cost of building a site eventually means fewer people can reach the content.

The Browser Upgrade campaign in 1999 asked sites to detect old browsers and politely tell visitors to update. In August 2004 a second campaign, Browse Happy, went after Internet Explorer specifically on security grounds, and WaSP handed it to Matt Mullenweg in June 2005 once it decided that campaigning against one vendor was not the mission it had signed up for.

~ the acid tests ~

Acid1 came out of the CSS1 test suite work and checked whether a browser could lay out a box. Acid2 arrived in 2005 as a single page that rendered into a yellow smiley face if your browser handled CSS correctly and into garbage if it did not, which turned a compliance argument into something a project manager could look at. Acid3 followed on 3 March 2008, written by Ian Hickson, scoring out of 100 with a visible number on the page.

The number is what made it work. Browser teams started racing it in public, and on 26 March 2008 Opera and WebKit announced 100/100 within hours of each other. A volunteer coalition with no leverage had built a scoreboard that commercial engineering organizations felt obliged to climb.

~ the next chapter ~

The closing post is unusual for a shutdown notice in that it is not sad. Gustafson wrote that thanks to the work of countless members and supporters, Tim Berners-Lee's vision of an open and universal web was largely the reality, and then the site stopped. There was no acquisition and no unpaid server bill behind it. The organization had a defined objective and reached it.

What it left behind is mostly invisible, which is the shape success takes here. Every browser now ships the same standards and competes on speed instead of on incompatible tag soup. The education work migrated into the places where people actually learn, which by 2013 meant MDN and a generation of designers who had read Zeldman's book. The site itself is frozen at March 2013 and still resolves, a WordPress install nobody has touched in thirteen years, with the closing post at the top.

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