Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Opera Starts Classroom For Web Standards

Opera announced today that it has launched an education initiative to teach people about web standards. The first part of the initiative is called the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (WSC) which is a curriculum covering the different web standards available today. The program constitutes of articles that are meant to be learning material for educational institutions as well as web developers.

The topics covered as part of the WSC include CSS, HTML, JavaScript, DOM and different concepts about the Web. All the material that is released as part of WSC will be available completely free under the Creative Commons License and can be found here. Over 50 articles on different topics have been planned and well-known Web developers such as Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman "Norm" Francis of Yahoo!, Peter-Paul Koch of quirksmode.org, Jonathan Lane, Linda Goin, Paul Haine, Roger Johansson of 456bereastreet, and Jen Hanen will be contributing the articles.

Opera has been one of the forefront browser supporting web standards. They were also the first to complete ACID3 test successfully and eventhough they still haven’t released a stable build that passes the test, it shows their commitment to support web standards. With so much talk about web standards, it is really odd to find so many websites that work properly only on IE. Its a shame that developers still don’t follow web standards and such initiative can only be useful if web developers realize that users are pissed off looking at non-standard websites.

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