Web Standards Project closes down

The wasp has stopped buzzing: the Web Standards Project considers its mission accomplished and has closed down. Just two and a half weeks after Bruce Lawson announced that it's all over for Opera's browser engine, he and two fellow contributors today buried another web standards institution that was born in the 1990s: the Web Standards Project (WaSP), an organisation whose webstandards.org domain has spread the W3C gospel since 1998.

"The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all" is how the organisation describes its own goals. WaSP was founded by web developers such as Jeffrey Zeldman (probably the most well-known among them) at the height of the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape. The project's original goal was to mitigate an imminent risk of fragmentation that was caused by browser incompatibilities. Later on, its focus shifted to working with the developers of browsers and editors, and to educating web developers.

However, in a post entitled "Our work here is done", the three authors conclude that "Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality" today. The makers of WaSP suggest that their supporters follow web sites such as webplatform.org or HTML5 Doctor, the W3C community or the Web Standards Sherpa educational resource. An archive of the project's documents and resources will remain available online.

(djwm)