Street Team: Make Your Mark

streetteam — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:27:36 +0000

Warning! This Book Could Be Hazardous to the Web!

How many outdated web design and development books are lurking in your local library, school or college, waiting to corrupt an innocent mind? Want to warn the unsuspecting of these hazardous materials while encouraging librarians to update their shelves? Join the WaSP Street Team by downloading and printing copies of these bookmarks (PDF 3.4MB). Then place these bookmarks in harmfully outdated books.

We’d love to see the bookmarks in action and hear what you have been up to - upload your photos to Flickr and add them to the WaSP Street Team Bookmarks group, tag any photos or blog posts with waspstreetteam.

Your mission,
should you decide to accept it,
will be to track down and identify
dangerously outdated web resources
and expose them as
the misleading charlatans
they truly are.

Common Crimes Against the Web:

Using table layout (rather than CSS layout)
Abusing (X)HTML markup (rather than using semantic markup)
Building inaccessible sites (rather than insuring that all content and functionality are available to people with disabilities)
Creating pages that only work in non-standards compliant browsers (rather than coding to web standards then hacking back for deviant browsers)

Caution: As much as these books need to be removed from public circulation and replaced with good books, you should never attempt to harm or destroy outdated books. Please treat these inaccurate tomes as ancient museum relics. Remember, that in addition to providing free access to knowledge, libraries are charged with maintaining history. All we are trying to accomplish here is to move these relics over to the outdated archives, you know, next to the “world is flat” and “pluto is a planet” sections.

So, what are you waiting for? Go make your mark!

The Street Team

drewm — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:56:32 +0000

WaSP has always been about the grass roots. The very reason for our existence is to represent our peers in standing up to The Big Boys with a common voice. And hey, look, it works! But guess what, this is 2007 and we’re all about the long tail now. It’s not the big boys’ butts we need to kick so much as the little boys, and to do that we need to flip this thing on its head.

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.