Welcoming Test the Web Forward to W3C
Author(s) and publish date
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Tobie Langel
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Two years ago a group of Web developers led by Divya Manian and Paul Irish launched a small web project called Move the Web Forward. Its fresh look, cute dinos, and grass-root nature quickly caught the attention of Adobe who reached out to the original creators and obtained the permission to start as spinoff focused on testing. Test the Web Forward was born.
A Thriving Community & a Recognizable Brand
Fast forward two years. Test the Web Forward is a recognizable brand among Web developers and thriving community bringing together Web developers and experts from all over the World to learn, share, write tests and improve browser interoperability.
Smart tag lines and cute logo aren't enough to build brands or communities, though. That takes hard work and dedication. Over the course of these two years, Adobe tirelessly fostered this community, organizing events, bringing in other key members of the industry to help along.
Adobe was so successful at driving this effort, that little after I joined W3C as a fellow from Facebook, I overheard Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and W3C's Director, refer to the W3C testing effort I was starting to pull together as "Test the Web Forward." That was a strong enough incentive to approach Adobe to suggest using Test the Web Forward as the umbrella brand for the entire Open Web Platform testing effort. Adobe was delighted with the proposal and obliged.
Today, I'm delighted to announce that we finalized the transaction and that Adobe officially gave the Test the Web Forward brand to W3C. In a sense that's a technicality, though. Test the Web Forward is essentially a community effort which W3C is proud to host.
Scaling-up Events & Revamping testthewebforward.org
What will this change, you might ask. Well, for Test the Web Forward Events, not much in the short run. Adobe has done a tremendous job teaming up with the industry and the community to organize events so far and will continue doing so in the near future. Longer term, however, the plan is to make Test the Web Forward Events more scalable and self-sustainable. For, at the current rate, it would take over a decade to complete the HTML5 test suite. So, whether you're interested in hosting a local Test the Web Forward meet-up, sponsor or host one of the larger events, please get in touch.
The website has also been recently overhauled. It now includes a blog, and more importantly, the canonical documentation for W3C Open Web Platform testing effort. The website's full source code is available on GitHub. Contributing couldn't be easier.
Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the people that have helped make this possible, and in particular Rebecca Hauck, Larry McLister and Israel Noto Garcia of the Adobe Web Platform Team. I hope to see some of you at the upcoming Test The Web Forward Event in Shenzhen.
hey nice article and congrates for finalizing the transaction and that Adobe officially gave the Test the Web Forward brand to W3C.
Regards and Best Wishes.
Ever wonder what would happen if Github gets sold and then closed down? It makes me uneasy how much of the webs infrastructure seems to rely on Github
Hi Rand, and thanks for your comment.
As always, choosing a set of technologies to rely on is a balancing act between security, convenience, costs, etc. The fact that GitHub relies essentially on open source tools and has a solid API to get at the data when that's not the case (e.g. for the issue tracker) really mitigates the risks. Given the traction and community GitHub has today and the convenience of its toolset, it's a worthwhile tradeoff to make.
The risk of seeing GitHub disappear is very low, but were that the case, we'd be able to migrate the website elsewhere literally within minutes. The website is generated by an open source tool (Jekyll) before being deployed as a set of static HTML files, so it can be hosted pretty much anywhere. Keeping it on GitHub at the moment is just a lot more convenient.