For Immediate Release Contact: Stauch, Vetromile & Mitchell PR (401) 438-0614 scarroll@svmmarcom.com / martha@svmmarcom.com PR contact for The Open Group Mr. Shane McCarron Program Manager for Network Computing The Open Group (612) 434-4431 Shane@themacs.com Chris Carrico Urge Public Relations 213-848-8743 chris@urgepr.com PR contact for the Web Standards Project THE OPEN GROUP AND WEB STANDARDS PROJECT COLLABORATE TO ENSURE SUPPORT FOR STANDARDS ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB Development of test suite enhances effort to develop web browser standards New York, New York - October 7, 1998 - The Open Group and the Web Standards Project (WSP), today participated in a joint announcement to endorse the WSP's goals and to announce a variety of new activities targeted at helping the industry realize their many common goals. During the course of this event, The Open Group and the Web Standards Project announced the following: * The public availability of an unrestricted access test suite to evaluate web browsers against the W3C's HTML 3.2 recommendation (http://www.opengroup.org/browsertest). The Web Standards Project will use the test suite to check web browsers for conformance to standards, and to publicize the results of this testing. * The development of tests for the W3C's HTML 4.0 recommendation and to extend the W3C's tests for their Cascading Style Sheets (issue 1) specification. The Open Group is inviting the industry to help by reviewing the tests as they are developed. This open process will help ensure that these tests are as comprehensive and accurate as possible, and ultimately, that browsers support the standards correctly. The WSP will evaluate the test tools against various implementations and share those results with The Open Group and the industry. * The launch of a formal effort within The Open Group to work with web content providers, determining their requirements for the evolution of browser support for standards. The WSP and its members are a key part of this requirements and specification development effort. The Open Group expects to make a major announcement about a broad program to deliver on these requirements for end users, content developers, tool developers, and browser vendors in the very near future. James DeRaeve, Director of Testing for The Open Group, said "The promise of the web is that through the use of agreed industry standards, web content can be accessed by users from any browser on any platform. The Web Standards Project and The Open Group have recognized that the lack of consistent support for these essential standards across all browsers creates unnecessary cost and usability barriers. While we encourage and support the efforts of the browser vendors to deliver leading edge functionality to their customers, both web content developers and users suffer if browsers don't support the basic web standards in similar ways. George Olsen, Project Leader for The Web Standards Project, says that the collaborative effort builds on each group's strengths. "The Open Group reaches a broad range of top IT professionals, while The Web Standards Project has been a grassroots effort among leading web developers and Web experts," he said. "Now we can work together toward getting browser makers to eliminate incompatibilities that add an extra 25 percent to the cost of web development and threaten to fragment the Web. As The Open Group has pointed out, unless browsers fully support web standards, these problems will worsen as browser move beyond the desktop into televisions, PDAs and device we haven't thought of yet." "The Open Group is pleased to be able to work with the Web Standards Project and the industry to drive toward agreement on how web standards should be implemented and relied upon to make web content portability and Open Systems a reality," said Shane P. McCarron, Program Manager for Network Computing at The Open Group. The detailed information collected by The Open Group's test suites complements an effort announced today by The Web Standards Project to gather case studies about the extra development costs that result from web developers having to deal with browser incompatibilities. About The Open Group: The Open Group is a vendor-neutral, international consortium of over 200 members with combined IT budgets in excess of $55 billion annually. It has been the technology industry's flagship specifications, testing and branding organization for over a decade and established many of the open technologies on which billions of dollars of IT systems rely today. The Open Group is working with suppliers and users establishing interoperability requirements across existing multiple platforms, today's new Internet-based technologies, and looking to tomorrow's investment decisions. Its mission is to facilitate a potential IT DialTone infrastructure - working with standards organizations and suppliers on open Internet and existing legacy infrastructure specifications. Formed in February 1996 by merging X/Open Company Ltd. and the Open Software Foundation, the company's eight sponsors are Compaq Computer Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd, International Business Machines Corporation, NCR Corporation, and Sun Microsystems Inc. The Open Group can be reached at www.opengroup.org. Note: UNIX and the X Device are registered trademarks, and IT DialTone and The Open Group are trademarks of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. About the WSP: The Web Standards Project is an international coalition of leader Web developers and Web experts, who are urging browser makers to fully support standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium. Since its launch in August 1998, WSP has gained more than 4,800 members-developers large and smaller-as well as endorsements from several leading professional organizations for Web developers, including the Association for Internet Professionals and the HTML Writers Guild.