RIP WaSP

When I started this site almost 20 years ago, the web was a very different animal. It was messy, unpredictable and occasionally hostile. Every browser had its own interpretation of reality, and getting a website to behave consistently across them required equal parts skill, patience and ritual sacrifice.

Into this chaos stepped organizations like the Web Standards Project, better known as WaSP.

It was recently announced that WaSP is shutting down. After 15 years in the trenches, they are declaring victory, packing up the artillery and going home. Browser standards have largely won. The barbarians have been driven from the gates. More or less.

The announcement comes shortly after Opera decided to abandon its own rendering engine in favor of WebKit. Another reminder of just how far we’ve traveled since the medieval web, when developers built separate versions of websites for different browsers and Internet Explorer could turn perfectly reasonable CSS into something resembling a crime scene.

The IT crowd in London 2011.

And yet, strangely, I’m going to miss it. Not the browser hacks. Not the endless debugging. Certainly not the hours spent trying to understand why something had moved three pixels to the left in Internet Explorer 6. But an era has ended.

Most web developers entering the profession today have probably never heard of WaSP. And that’s actually a sign of success. The organization helped solve a problem so thoroughly that an entire generation can now afford to be unaware that the battle ever took place.

Still, knowing a little history never hurts. As the old cliché goes, without learning from our mistakes we are bound to repeat them. The web we have today didn’t simply appear, fully formed and standards-compliant, from the forehead of Tim Berners-Lee. People fought over it. They argued, experimented, broke things and occasionally forced enormous software companies to behave themselves.

So raise a glass to WaSP. The war is over. The veterans can finally leave the battlefield. Until, of course, we invent something equally stupid to fight about.