Web Standards Project

News feeds (RSS/Atom) are a fabulous technology. They’re not dead but this is the most recent cut in the killing of the Open Web with “death by a thousand cuts”¹. After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there. This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available. All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some…

How far back can we go? insin/DOMBuilder was initially based on a 2006 library of the same - but differently-cased - name by Dan Webb (https://www.webstandards.org/2006/04/13/dom-builder) and the earliest variant I can recall was Mochikit.DOM (https://mochi.github.io/mochikit/doc/html/MochiKit/DOM.html) By the end of DOMBuilder's life it could generate DOM or HTML from the same code and I'd tried unsuccessfully to implement a way to rehydrate HTML by hooking up events using the same code on the client. Not long after, I happened to be in the audience for Pete Hunt's React: Rethinking best practices talk at JSConf EU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY) and I was totally floored; they'd solved everything I had been trying to do with UI as code and much more, and JSX was the icing on the cake, as using nested object/array syntax has always been rife with comma-management hell when you're maintaining UI code.

Patchy 3G coverage in areas is just one example of where a browser that's fully capable of running the latest JavaScript whizzbangs, yet still finds itself in a situation where it doesn't have any JavaScript to run. At this point, the browser has no choice but to fallback to an HTML only state (or perhaps an HTML+CSS state). The times when this happens is out of our control, and it will never be in our control. How you do that, is your choice. Other people can continue along the route of "they are not my audience" either until their audience drops to zero, or someone slaps a discrimination lawsuit on them. Flaky 3G connections are just one example of factors outside a web developer's control. But there are many others. Consider this: Opera mini is essentially a proxied browser. A server takes a static snapshot of a page and sends it on to Opera mini. No-one in their right mind would need such a locked down browser on their mobile devices. Especially not on an iPhone running Mobile Safari. And yet we have this: http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Opera_Mini_… -- Opera Mini being the top Free App on the Apple iPhone Appstore in _20_ countries simultaneously. Consider how SproutCore deals with 'offline storage' in a browser that doesn't currently support HTML5's local storage. I'd bet they follow dojo and use a series of fallbacks, and one out of that series is using a 1x1 pixel Flash app that has the ability to write to the…

The web standards project was founded in 1998. https://www.webstandards.org/about/index.html

Is ACID3 the most relevant test? It was released in 2008 and had some updates in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3, https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/ Does it check flexbox and grid support for example?

There's something like Acid3, but it doesn't give you information as to what failed when you get a less-than-perfect score. (Test: http://acid3.acidtests.org/ | Information: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/) There are also all those other browser benchmarks (e.g. http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/), but those include things other than the layout engine, such as javascript performance, webGL, etc. You could try poking around a few of them and only looking at the CSS and DOM sections though (http://web.basemark.com/).

More like the new Acid [1] test. [1] http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

Oddly enough I just checked and Safari is not passing the Acid2 right now. Happens on my iPhone too. http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

There is a guide explaining how the smiley is drawn. Interesting reading. http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/

The courts seem to think so http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_web_sites_ada_compliant.htm http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202424114568&Settlement_Ove… http://www.webstandards.org/2006/02/14/nfb-vs-target-in-perspective/

> Look at what it took for them to get to embrace HTML tools, all of which are very recent. Recent? I don't use Adobe tools one way or another, but recent is hardly the word I'd choose. It's been, what, over a decade now, or near enough to make no matter[1]. Yes, this starts with Macromedia, but it isn't like Adobe isn't working with a group to build useful tools. Just because they support their own format doesn't mean they aren't supporting other formats. This doesn't mean they only focused on standards compliance. They are a tools company, and they build tools for people to use. So, do you really mean HTML? [1] http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/ - Note the section "Release of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX."

I couldn't give a damn about supporting unfinalised standards the ACID3 tests MS too sometimes speaks of Acid3 in dismissive terms as having little relevancy. Let's see and then decide by yourself, is this stuff important: DOM2 Core DOM2 Events DOM2 HTML DOM2 Range DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, …) DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker) DOM2 Views (defaultView) ECMAScript HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, …) HTTP (Content-Type, 404, …) Media Queries Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic changes, …) XHTML 1.0 CSS2 (@font-face) CSS2.1 (‘inline-block’, ‘pre-wrap’, parsing…) CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), …) CSS3 UI (‘cursor’) data: URIs SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, …) (Taken from: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/) Looks important to me.

Selling web applications that don't work without Javascript is legally dangerous (discriminates against disabled users). There's a lot more to accessibility than making sure your site works without Javascript, but if you're missing this piece its somewhat of a moot point. There's never been a case that's gone to verdict on the matter, so its still somewhat of a gray area. But the reason they don't go to verdict is because the offending company has always agreed to a large cash settlement. Target's $6MM settlement with the Federation for the Blind is the most recent case.[1] There's plenty of large websites that drop the ball here (e.g., Reddit), but that doesn't mean its safe to do so. Ignore accessibility at your own risk. [1]http://www.webstandards.org/2008/08/28/what-the-target-settlement-shou…

Related? From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172 "It looks like an object element that's pointing to a non-existent page (http://www.webstandards.org/404/) should be falling through, but that page is now returning a response status of 200 (success) instead of 404. Was it previously correctly returning a 404 response?"