WaSP

About WaSP | The advantages of using Standards

Web Standards Project (WaSP)

WaSP was formed in 1998. From the very start its mission has revolved around fighting about web standards in order to reduce the complexity and costs of developement. This is also to greatly contribute to the increasing of accessibility and long-term viability of any site that appears on the Web. To attain our goals and deliver the true power of standards to this medium we work with authoring tool makers, browser companies, and our peers.

Born of Necessity

Web Standards Project (WaSP) was founded in order to promote web standards and encourage browser makers to do the same, and consequently to ensure accessibility to everyone.

Although the message of WaSP initially met with resistance (particularly on the part of browser companies' marketing and P.R. departments), but it finally was a success - partially due to the fact that many engineers at browser companies agreed that Wasp was right and saw it as an ally in the internal fights with their management.

Gradually, starting with year 2000, standards interpretation in all the leading browsers began to improve notably. Currently the vast majority of them, not only the most popular ones, greatly support HTML 4, XHTML 1, CSS, ECMAScript (the standard version of JavaScript) i DOM - or is on the right way to achieve that.

Thanks to these browsers, web designers and developers are eventually able to build sites using XHTML i CSS, and in most cases they can sepatate presentation from structure in order to maximize portability and accessibility. Also, acting carefully, they can use W3C standard - DOM to make their pages behave in a sophisticated way.

What is the problem then?

Browser developers are not the problem any longer. Problem is rather caused by designers and developers that use queer browser markups (those from 90's) because they frequently don't realize that it is possible to support the current standards while adjusting pages to old browsers.

Similarly like WaSP once spoke to browser developers, at present they adress their message to designers, developers, authoring tool makers and their clients: W3C standards are supported by all the popular web browsers and are the only means that guarantees that pages that are built nowadays, will always work.

Glossary of related terms

Web Standards - the term generally refers to the formal standards, as well as technical specifications that determin and describe significant, basic elements of the World Wide Web. Recently, the name has been more commonly bound up with the trend of propagating a set of best practices for building standardized web sites, and a philosophy of development and web design that contains those methods.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - Formed by W3C language that enables to render the style of a web page from multiple sources with a defined order of precedence. The most common elements formated by means of CSS are font, size, color, spacing, etc. One of these is defined - a style is ascribed to a certain element of a web page.

Hi-Tech - related to newest achievements of science and engineering monitoring very commonly associated with the term Up To Date Technology in any given field of technology.

DOM (Document Object Model) - is a programming interface specification being developed by W3C. It allowes a programmer create and modify HTML pages and XML documents in order to come up with full-fledged program objects.

W3C - abbreviation of World Wide Web Consortium which is the international governing body. Its task is to develop platform independent web standards and specifications. The already existing standards that have been defined by W3C are HTML, CSS and XML.