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.
