Pranzo con Kynn a Filippi’s
Today was unremarkable save that I had an enjoyable lunch with Kynn at local Pizza joint Filippis’s Pizza Grotto. There is no electronic substitute for good company, conversation, and food.
There are not many people on the planet who I can keep up with and can keep up with me while: eating antipasto and pizza; talking about Justice League, the W3C, section 508, CSS, web accessibility, the Web Standards Project, mailing lists, web.archive.org, DeCSS, Jakob Nielsen, Apple Industrial Design and Anime. Kynn took the train down (he lives north quite a few miles) and used the excuse that he could get some writing done on the train.
Entirely stimulating, and a very long lunch. Thankfully, I have a flexible employer.
I think the neatest thing about today’s lunch is that I realized something core about what’s going on today. That the September 11th events have brought in many web geeks a desire to do something more—to work towards projects and things which matter in ways that maybe can’t be expressed as part of a stock portfolio or balance sheet. I had not put it into words that way, but Kynn’s right. More of my friends and acquaintances who do web work are thinking of it in very different terms.
The other thing that I realized is that The Web Standards Project has not by any stretch fulfilled it’s mission. Kynn made me understand even clearer that the W3C’s role is really as a technical standards body. The W3C’s role is not and never has been one of advocacy. They merely write up “Recommendations.” Well dammit, there’s a need for Advocacy out there, and that’s the reason the The Web Standards Project was born in the first place – to interact with developers, user agent creators, authoring tool vendors – everyone who uses web standards.
Along the same lines, this is interesting: There is no grassroots organizationp taking up the issue of Web Accessibility as something to fight for, and something to evangelize on. There are folks doing lobbying, and writing law, but there’s no independent group serving an advocacy role for web accessibility.
I love passionate groups of people banding together. I’d like to see something more in this area.
Much food for thought for me.
And the pizza was good too.
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Tags: food, Jakob Nielsen, Justice League, Web Accessibility, web standards, Web Standards Project, web.archive.org
Dylan Foley has thorough considerations of the Web Standards Project and the recent activity on that site. He apologizes to me for stating that of the members of the WSP nobody had mentioned the recent events. No harm no foul Dylan. As far as anyone on that list having anything to do with WSP decisions, I’ve no idea. Jeff Zeldman appears to be going it alone. That’s his perogative as the current Group Leader. I do have one correction though—Dylan states “since it’s inception, he has been the public face of the WaSP and it’s Group Leader”—which is incorrect. George Olsen did the heavy lifting as the Leader who got WSP off the ground those years ago.
There have been some mishaps for WebStandards.org over the years – the initial signup-for-support database was lost if I remember correctly – and various discussion lists which were once vital are nowhere to be found on the site. I think that there’s still a role for an advocacy organization to champion Jane Q. Developer. Luckily, WSP is only hibernating—it’s not dead.
Tags: Dylan Foley, George Olsen, Jeff Zeldman, Web Standards Project, WSP
Whither WaSP?
Do I have the the earliest mention of the Web Standards Project on usenet?
I ask only because the Google usenet archive is current news right now. And another piece of current news is that the Web Standards Project is going on hiatus. I think WSP pushed for good things from Netscape and Microsoft. I had a part in writing the mission statement. I’ve had that early email of the alpha version of the mission statement on my site for a while. It evolved with the work of many more articulate than I into a fine mission statement. I wish that the [stds] mailing list archive were online. I’d like to be able to see those first discussions again—that vital energy was infectious, and empowering. We felt like we could take on the world! Or at least change the software development directions of two multimillion dollar companies.
In the end, I don’t know how much effect WSP had. But it remains as it has been in my Fellow Founding Member biography: I am “proud to be involved, even cursorily, with something as worthwhile as the WaSP.
Tags: energy, google, microsoft, software development directions, Web Standards Project
About the W3C’s New Patent Policy which is getting so much attention these days.
I think you’re right. At some point several years ago a whole battery of folks were mad enough about the mess of standards support that we formed the Web Standards Project. I think that that kind of grassroots development was something that was listened to because dammit, we don’t want to have to write MS-HTML, Nescape-HTML, Opera-HTML, Whatever-HTML, etc – we’d much prefer for the browser makers to support a core functionality that we can use – and the w3c Recommendations are a great starting point. My hope is, that they will continued to me.
In my estimation, companies are free to continue making proprietary extensions to html and css (page transitions,
Tags: html, Web Standards Project
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