In a recent post over on the Web Standards Project blog I introduced the newest and first book released by the WaSP – InterACT With Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design.
This is a great reference teaching the craft and profession of building web sites, and not just a book about markup or 3 column layouts with CSS. Read more about it in the blog post or go straight to the book’s companion site.
A few weeks ago The Web Standards Project and WaSP Edu Task Force launched a new venture to help create a curriculum outline, guidelines and course samples for those teaching a variety of web related disciplines [it takes more then just good HTML coders to create a good web site]. While I may have had my hands in the code for the site, the real heavy lifting of designing the site and creating the foundation and content for the curriculum project was done by others.
Designer Jessi Talyor posted a short recap of her great work branding the WaSP InterAct and designing the web site and print materials.
Form more information or to learn about how you can contribute to the WaSP InterAct Project check out Aaron Walter’s interview on this Boagworld Podcast, Christopher Schmidt, the official announcement, or follow waspinteract on twitter.
[Hey, any buttons left for me?]
above photo by Jessi Taylor
This week saw the end of winter mixing with the first day of spring — in the northeast that meant snowflakes on the few flowers that have started poking out. There’s also been a flurry of activity on the net from site launches to reports from the SXSWi and MIX09 conferences and some other good stuff I thought needed to be called out.
I can only take credit for a small production role, but this past week the Web Standards Project launched WaSP Interact. Its a new effort to promote standards aware education through a curriculum, outlines, and general standards advocacy. The goal is to provide a framework and reference for helping students become web professionals and looks to cover beyond mere font end development and extend web standards and best practices knowledge into all disciplines involved in producing a web site.
On a more somber note, this week came lots of news of the shuttering of Nokia’s MOSH mobile file sharing site. It was an interesting project to be involved in that I’m sorry to see come to an early end, or well, a new beginning. If its still up when you’re reading this check out this hidden gem user moshing’s drawings to your phone for some quirky handmade wallpapers. Some reports this week sniped at it for its seedier side to which my response will forever be nice ass.
SXSWi wrapped up this week and there’s plenty of reports from the field to catch up on. Not having gone myself I’m the wrong person to recap it so I’ll just point to Molly’s CSS3 Panel slides links and the whole shebang in MP3 from SXSW. [You can say its a podcast, SXSW, but if I can’t subscribe to the feed straight to my MP3 player its not].
The big news from Microsoft’s MIX event was the official release of Internet Explorer 8. Nuff said.
Going to the more technical end here are some things to check out for your hardcore JS coders:
The Web Standards Project held our annual meeting at SXSW this evening. During the session Kimberly Blessing announced the the formation of our newest initiative, the WaSP Street Team. From the web site:
The WaSP Street Team is about you. No, not all the other YOUs reading this but YOU you, in your actual skin. The idea is that together we create a number of tasks – challenges if you will – to help the promotion of web standards in your local community. Things that will help get the word out to the businesses, educational institutions, web shops and individuals who live and operate directly near you. As a central group it’s hard for us to reach those people, but as a distributed team, it’s easy.
Get yourself on the announcement list and watch the blog for more information on how you can help contribute to the effort, and look for new tools and materials to help you get out and spread the word about Web Standards in your organizations and communities.
