Goodnight WaSP

I’m currently in Montreal, Canada presenting at the excellent ConFoo conference here. One of the presentations I have given is my talk Pushing the Boundaries without Breaking the Web. At the beginning of that talk I speak a little bit about where we have come from. I talk about how, back when I became involved with the Web Standards Project, we looked forward to a time where we could develop using standards in one modern browser and it would just work in the others. We’re mostly at that point now. Browsers may have more or less support for newer parts of the specifications, typically though they implement standard things in a standard way.

What we also see is browser and tool manufacturers actually innovating and contributing to the standards. I have written recently about Grid Layout, proposed by Microsoft and the exciting Regions and Exclusions work from Adobe. These are exciting times to be a web developer.

The WaSP involved me at an early point in my career, I was a young and inexperienced web developer using Dreamweaver. However the message of the WaSP really made sense to me, and I had been advocating web standards on Dreamweaver forums and the other groups in which I was active. Drew McLellan and I were asked to help form the Dreamweaver Task Force, a change of direction for WaSP in terms of working with a development environment rather than with browser vendors.

I learned much from being part of WaSP. I hope that I have managed to pass that on to others, as I will continue to do. There are still many things we, as a community of developers, need to work on if we are to ensure the web remains for everyone. However it seems to be the right time for the Web Standards Project to close. It was an honour to be a small part of it.