The Wasp is Back, Stinger and All

So you've designed a beautiful Web site using standard markup, admired the results in your favorite browser, and slept like a baby certain the project is a success.

After the first refreshing night of sleep since the project started, you go to your workstation and it dawns on you that you forgot to check your newly finished Web site in that other browser. Confident it will render just fine, you check the pages and—horror of horrors—your beautiful site is a chaotic mess. Time for another all nighter working in a coffee-induced stupor to get you through the hell of trying to make a Web site work with multiple browsers.

Meet the Men in Black and Yellow

Why are we in this browser mess today? There are a number of reasons. First, browser developers add proprietary tags to their Web browsers to give themselves a competitive advantage. A developer could strictly follow the standards set by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but some standards aren't supported and can cause broken sites. Unfortunately, some browsers support some tags, other browsers support other tags, and none of them provide full support for all tags. It's clear to any working Web designer that creating interoperable sites is a very challenging undertaking.

Enter our superheroes—the men and women of WaSP, a volunteer-based organization that's working to make our lives as developers and designers as easy as possible.

WaSP began when several prominent Web developers, frustrated by the difficulties in creating interoperable sites, banded together. They called their battle plan the "Web Standards Project" (WSP or WaSP for short). WaSP's impatience with the browser makers' inability to support standards created by W3C and European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) provided them with the necessary fuel to begin their mission. WaSP stormed the Internet press in 1998, attacking Web browser manufacturers with an in-your-face attitude. WaSP made a lot of noise, and the buzz of these worker wasps eventually gained the attention of a few important ears such as Netscape and Microsoft.

Lost the Land of Milk and Honey

But after making waves in the Web development world, WaSP ran into troubled waters of their own. First, many original committee members left, departing for diverse reasons. The great demands of being an active member in WaSP ate into work time—especially when your full-time job required 12+ hour days. Some moved on to new projects and a few felt they had nothing further to contribute. Then, problems with server service ensued. WaSP was originally hosted by Project Cool, along with A List Apart—a Web developer online magazin e run by Jeffrey Zeldman—and High Five—a well-known online Web design magazine that went off the air in January 2000. When DevX bought Project Cool, the arrangement didn't include these three sites. But DevX continued to temporarily host the sites while they searched for a new server.

Jeffrey Zeldman, the current Group Leader and one of the cofounders, says that this temporary arrangement became a disaster when DevX lost half of WaSP's data while transferring the site from Linux to Windows NT. The result? Two years of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) compliance testing by a group of expert WaSPs who volunteered their time to show browser makers the flaws with their CSS implementation—gone. Plus, half of the WaSP contents along with the WaSP database and backend also went to wasp heaven.

Steve Champeon stepped in to save the day. Champeon brought the resources of hesketh.com to the table. hesketh.com now provides hosting services, offers the services of employees to help out with the WaSP site, and has re-energized WaSP's commitment to promote standards compliance. This has given WaSP a new nest to call home, and is breathing life back into its activities.

"hesketh.com . . . has given WaSP a new nest to call home."

When asked about the challenges faced by the loss of so much important data, Champeon points to certain domain-related problems having to do with the current lamentable management of the Domain Name System of Network Solutions. He graciously spared me the "glimpse of hell" he believes the DNS management situation encompasses and pointed out that it is "not as easy or as reliable as it should be."

Despite this major set back and changes in leadership, WaSP's force has never veered away from its ultimate mission. Having received attention from the bigwigs, WaSP now works with these companies behind the scenes. The WaSP sting has softened, with members taking a less aggressive, more hands-on attitude, participating in the development of products when permitted. When they run into resistance, they go back to the typing board and deliver more press releases to bring unresolved standards compliance issues to the attention of the Web world.

Chalk One Up for the Good Guys

WaSP recently experienced a taste of victory when Netscape 6 was released. WaSP's activities are in part responsible for Netscape 6's very strong compliance with Web standards. WaSP got Netscape's attention by collecting thousands of signatures from developers, asking Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and create a new browser based on the open-source Gecko rendering engine. While Netscape 6 hasn't in and of itself solved the problems associated with standards compliance, it's still a major step forward.

Zeldman provides another example of a winning moment in WaSP history. By working with Microsoft, WaSP has been able to improve CSS support in the Internet Explorer Macintosh edition, which is almost perfect in terms of following HTML and CSS1 recommendations as per the W3C.

Competition and Innovation

If you read WaSP's FAQs, you'll see that standards compliance doesn't have to interfere with healthy American competition. Nor will it stifle creativity. Even though the IE 5.0 Macintosh edition browser is extremely strong in its standards compliance, Microsoft still had the opportunity to be innovative with its text zoom feature. This feature allows users to change text size whether or not it was specified in pixels, percentages, ems, or any other available sizing option.

Zeldman provides an analogy of this balance of standards compliance and innovation by pointing to the manufacturers of CD players. Toshiba, Sony, and Yamaha all use the same standards, create their own product designs, and are able to enjoy their own share of the market. There's no such thing as a CD "optimized" for any one brand. One of the goals of standards compliance is to ensure that a site isn't optimized for any one Web browser, and that the consumer can use the browser he or she prefers.

By developing innovative interfaces on the user experience front, providing more customizable environments, and avoiding product failures, browser manufacturers can compete without having to push proprietary features over standards. Examples of this approach include features like faster page rendering, less demand of on-system resources, and enabling users to configure plug-ins and players with ease.

WaSP shies away from asking browser manufacturers to cease innovation. Instead, their focus has been to encourage everyone to follow the core recommendations that the W3C and ECMA work diligently to create.

Why WaSP?

Why do we need WaSP when we have the organizations that create Web standards such as ECMA and W3C? Zeldman explains it perfectly when he says, "If Tim Berners-Lee had said, 'Please join my organization, help come up with standards, and then we will destroy you if you fail to support the standards'—what large company would have joined such an organization?" The W3C provides the vision and works with all parties to determine the standards. Their job isn't to act like the police. Therefore, an organization like WaSP makes sense.

It's Zeldman's belief that when we finally implement all standards, developers and designers will be able to reap tangible rewards, including:

• Eased Web accessibility for everyone
• Increased presentation and transactional sophistication
• Streamlined production
• Reduced production costs
• Improved time spent on content, concepts, design and user support

Zeldman reinforces this by saying that the implementation of standards " . . . will free creative designers, programmers, writers, and producers to create products, entertainments, communities and resources we've only begun to dream about. It will enable all people to use the Web, while also making the Web accessible to the broadest possible range of Internet devices. All of this depends on Web standards. They are the baseline that will enable us to move forward."

WaSP's Latest Battle Plans Revealed!

Not only is WaSP working with browser makers, they also have steering committee members focused on Web building tools. Dori Smith, one of the members working on the toolmakers initiative, is collaborating with developers of Web design software like Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Adobe's GoLive. Smith describes how many hardcore developers avoid using WYSIWYG editors, but most of the code on the Web is generated by one product or another and no longer coded by hand. The drawback is that they add unnecessary markup.

The WaSP team is working to ensure that future releases of visual editors offer the user a choice of creating standards-compliant code. Smith confirms that these companies are aware that reviewers are checking for standards support in these Web building tools. Smith explains that "standards compliance does not mean that we're requesting that the tool makers change their products drastically and drop all their proprietary magic. What we're requesting is that users are at least given the option to skip these features in favor of creating compliant pages."

The Americans with Disabilities Act is a factor in getting more companies to be open to Web standards today. Smith clarifies, "We've gotten a lot of traction from tool makers lately by using the argument that a standards compliant page is an accessible page. They (and their customers) recognize that ADA requirements make accessibility a prerequisite for many clients' sites."

Another focus of WaSP is to educate developers. But I'm not talking about formal education here like going to a campus and carrying around $100 worth of books. It's as easy as completing a tutorial on one of the many online Web development resources. WaSP provides a list of such resources on its Web site and writes articles for some of them as well.

". . . according to Zeldman, not all education and communication efforts have been rosy."

But according to Zeldman, not all education and communication efforts have been rosy. He believes WaSP failed to communicate to the design community effectively about Netscape's removal of its own, proprietary layers technology in version 6. Apparently, Netscape provided warnings in 1998 and WaSP communicated this as well. Yet, developers were outraged when Netscape 6 came out because they felt they weren't given a heads up.

Now it's Your Turn

Zeldman and Champeon agree that developers are encouraged to validate and fix problems before assuming it's a standards issue and approaching WaSP. They're now working to improve the education of Web developers on how to interpret standards, how to test for and diagnose problem, and how to implement compliant workarounds.

More often than not, when developers complain that a browser fails to properly display a Web site they created, the errors are in the code and markup and not with browser compliance. WaSP is also aggressively asking developers to review their style sheets, ensure that all tags are closed including <p>, verify that the DOCTYPE is included, and validate the use of the latest scripts especially for browser detection. You can use Web sites like validator.w3.org to validate your markup. After checking and rechecking and rechecking (did I say "recheck it?") your code, then and only then, report the bug. Write to [email protected] to report standards-related errors in IE; go to Mozilla to report Mozilla bugs, and check Netscape for known bugs in Netscape 6.

Champeon points out that "it's always useful for us to be able to point browser vendors at a test suite result and say, 'Hey, look, there are interaction problems between your 100% support for CSS and your 100% support for HTML 4.01 that are making it impossible to use them together,' rather than just asking them in steadily more and more shrill tones to 'support the standards.'"

Developers can get up to speed by joining a community where they can pose questions and exchange information. An excellent way of doing this is by joining a mailing list like Champeon's extremely popular Webdesign-L—admittedly my favorite Web design list—or following the articles and community activities of such publications and groups as A List Apart or Evolt.

"Wasp was briefly down, but is by no means out."

Champeon asks that anyone who wants to help create or maintain test suites for standards or run new or beta browsers through these test suites, contact [email protected]

WaSP was briefly down, but is by no means out. With the support of hesketh.com, they're back—bigger and badder than ever. Remember the browser incompatibility nightmare? Don't let it happen to you. Become adept by listening to the advice of WaSP. Check the WaSP Web site for regular updates.

The WaSP may sting, and the truth is that a sting will hurt. While WaSP continues to encourage browser developers and visual editor manufacturers to comply with standards and recommendations, it's up to us as designers and developers to avoid pain by using those recommendations appropriately.

Meryl is a freelance writer for The Dallas Morning News and various dot-com Web sites.

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