The Beginning of a Change

Early in the new century, Web budgets shriveled as capital dried up. While the economy took a nosedive, those who still had jobs quickly realized that the extra work of coding for broken and nonstandard browsers was too much to sustain; something had to be done.

A grassroots organization of Web designers who called themselves the Web Standards Project (or WaSP; www.webstandards.org) (FIGURE 1) worked with the major browser manufacturers of the time to bring their wildly varying software into line with the "Recommendations" being generated by the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C). Standardizing on the specifications produced by the W3C injected a sense of consistency into Web authoring. Over time it became possible for Web designers to create a complex page in HTML and be assured that it would render reasonably consistently across many browsers and operating systems.

Figure 1. The Web Standards Project.

Many of the specifications released by the W3C deal with advanced coding and architecture problems that the average Web designer will rarely need to worry about. Although, beginning with a standardized version of HTML in the mid 1990s, the W3C produced a series of specifications for code sent to the browser that attempted to solve the compatibility problems in an intelligent, usable, and accessible manner.

Note

The W3C is interested in advancing the state of the Web. Producing recommendations since 1996, they have sought to provide solutions to the wide variety of technological challenges the Web presents.