The Adventures of Cindy Li

SXSW 2006: Wasp Task Force (WTF)

March 13 , 2006

Speakers

Moderator: Molly E Holzschlag Pres, Molly.com Inc
Steven Champeon CTO,  hesketh.com Inc
Matt May,  Dir of Technology,  Blue Flavor
Drew McLellan ,Web Application Developer
Dori Smith,  Writer
Jennifer Taylor, Macromedia
Chris Wilson,  Group Program Mgr,  Microsoft
Kimberly Blessing, KimmieCorp
Molly Holzschlag Pres,  Molly.com Inc

The web standards project is…

A grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple afforable access to web technologies for all.
WaSP Task forces
Overview and strategy: Drew McLellan WaSP Strategy & Publics relations, DWTF

The problems we’ve been dealing w/is quite broad.
WTF? What is the WaSp task force?
Why WaSP is now focusing on task forces

It is now possible to deploy a site once and it is done.

We’ve come a long way because of standards. What we really do is we work closely with adobe/macromedia/microsoft and various browser manufacturers to support standards. As we move further along to be more specific we need experts. Everything is more specialized one person can’t do everything. We have teams of little specialists. Task forces for things like dreamweaver..

Matt May:

Empowerment and user educations for users with disabilities
problems and solutions for developers and designers
advice, assistance and market pressure for software vendors
technical implementations for W3C/WAI

Accessibility is not something you can buy

How do you buy quality?
The point is there are lot of variables and views. We want to help everyone work toward a better model for accessibility for the range of disabilities and we split it up into users w/disabilities themselves. We put them back in the center of things. We think its about the standard but its more than that. Get back to the people part.
We want to empower to discover tools to make using the web easier. To create web content easier. To learn more about what they are able to do. For designers and developers we know there are problems.. there are more questions than answers.
We can have some patterns in place that do the things well. Spread the knowledge. Among all designers and developers. We want to work w/software developers.
We all have work to do no one has everything down right. We want to progressively make it easier w/o a lot of thinking. W3C is developing standards 2.0
It’s important to see and make this better. We want to make it better. This is what is making it better.

Molly: make the information easier for designers, who likes reading it.
Our job is bridging the gap to make it easier, for people who don’t want to go through the site and reading all of it.

Acid2 (Acid2TF)
Molly E. Holzschlag, WaSP group lead
Opera software… what it was meant to do wasn’t translated.

The true purpose of acid2

Acid2-one year later
Because it was sponsored by a software vendor. Was this really an agenda?
Absolutely.. (molly), it was a problem w/the vision. Get back to platform independent. The test..using a specific vendor to do this was bad in hindsight.
It was to make something one vendor wanted to make the other vendor to do.
Simply better communication.  Winds of change are accurate. We now have the ie folks blogging, opera blogging, and mozilla blogging to see what is happening.
It is a good measure.

We all started a discussion w/the developers opera/mozilla/microsoft.

What are the steps..?

No consensus so far.
Getting others and all of them to enable all agents even the other platforms.
Very possible Acid tests would be created soon.

DOM Scripting (DSTF)

Dori Smith the other person.. Jeremy Keith
Ajax means “Javascript works now”

JavaScript is a real programming language
Unlike other task forces. We aren’t lobbying the browser makers.
One of the reasons things are working is because they have implemented XHTML
it is not a standard that came out…

it is now called AJAX.

So because enough other browsers we don’t have to check to see exactly which browser doesn’t have it.  One of the things we do .. everyone on the board is a scriptor. Code that we’ve implemented on a site. A lot of this is based on education. The people that learned html. If you do javascript you are busy.
Articles on the dom scripting site and others elsewhere. A number of us have written books on what we’ve found. We need your help. If you are doing blog posts explaining. We want good information out there.

JavaScript best practices

We are talking about best practices. Unobtrusive scripting.  Accessibility we’ve been working w/ATF. You can have javascript or accessibility.. you can have it both if you are doing it right. If a client supports js you can get more.
You’ll hear more over the next year.

Acid3-a collaborative future?

Dreamweaver (DWTF)
Jennifer Taylor, Adobe
MX release. A great first step of being compliant but it was invaluable. Created a rallying with the team about the standards. Educating users about standards.
We’ve made some progress.. room for improvement. The task force is good for moving the industry forward. We all grow together.

A bit of history

Key achievements
Key challenges
Moving forward

We’re a tool. We validate using the w3c, for educating as the bar.
We can’t really save users from themselves. To be good you have to know the basics.
Our inspiration is your brain. The task force is invaluable to us. You are the inspiration and we look forward to more.

Blessing: the education task force is to raise standards and accessibility.
In academia you get a varying response from administrators.

There are 9 full wasp members…

encouraging instructors
encouraging students
assist educational organizations in creating standards complaint, accessible sites
Getting colleges to teach standards

We welcome everyone to join..

70 members on the list.. all over the world.
Unveiled an irc channel, how to get on it is on the website.
Participate in higher education and the events that support higher education.
HiEdWeb-professionals that work at higher educations
HiEdDev-rochestor/october this year. They are looking to expand their roll. Put together a panel.  Instead of looking at the website right now but look later.. we’re having tech difficulties.

Wilson:
IE 1.0…
part of IE 3-7.. and spent some time on the windows foundation team as well.
Even before I was an advocate standards guy. HTML specs.. etc ..
I’ve participated in working groups. Sometimes its a good thing sometimes its a bad thing. I’ve been really excited about the WaSP task force to give a representative voice to balance out the needs of developers and also the end users.
Microsoft platform, products and web standards

How WASP has helped

Internet Explorer and web standards
What the future holds

I’ve worked w/it near its conception it was a little more covert. In the past it wasn’t as true as it could have been. It’s also why I rejoined the ie team.
Times do change we worked on security more than anything. Because of that we fell behind in standard support. IE 6 supports fine .. standards.. (typo ;) )
We have a lot more work ahead of us.  The bar does keep moving.