W3C Archives - CSS-Tricks

A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter

# February 7, 2018 By Jason Hoffman

In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

If there’s just the slightest hint of wistful regret in Gustafson’s message, it’s because the Web Standards Project changed everything that had become the norm on the web during its 15+ years of service. Through dedication and developer advocacy, they hoisted the web up from a nest of browser incompatibility and meaningless markup to the standardized and feature-rich application platform most of us know today.

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Further working mode changes at WHATWG

# December 26, 2017 By Geoff Graham

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) announced that it has adopted a formal governance structure:

The WHATWG has operated successfully since 2004 with no formal governance structure, guided by a strong culture of pragmatism and collaboration. Although this has worked well for driving the web forward, we realized that we could get broader participation by being clear about what rights and responsibilities members of the community have. Concretely, this involves creating an IPR Policy and governance structure.

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standards W3C WHATWG

20 Years of CSS

# December 17, 2016 By Chris Coyier

Bert Bos, noting today as quite a notable day:

On December 17, 1996, W3C published the first standard for CSS.

Very interesting to see what historic points made the cut for the timeline. The Zen Garden, acid tests, preprocessors... good times!

history W3C

“Maybe The Most Exciting Development In CSS You’ve Never Heard Of”

# March 25, 2016 By Robin Rendle

Philip Walton has the scoop on Houdini, a new W3C task force that’s planning to give developers low level browser APIs:

The bottom line is, imagine how much nicer your development life would be if you could use any CSS property and know for sure it was going to work, exactly the same, in every browser. And think about all of the new features you read of in blog posts or hear about at conferences and meetups — things like CSS grids, CSS snap points and sticky positioning. Imagine if you could use all of them today and in a way that was as performant as native CSS features. And all you’d need to do is grab the code from GitHub.

This is the dream of Houdini. This is the future that the task force is trying to make possible.

csswg houdini W3C