14 DAY TRIAL // The jQuery Core group announced their latest initiative, a Web Standards Team which will bridge the gap between developers, standards organizations and browser manufactures.
This latest initiative from the jQuery group aims to fight to good fight with all thy might, to find the true interests of web developers and protect them in the face of standards organizations like TC39 and W3C.
The Standards Team plans to organize discussion groups, meetings and conversations, gather all the data and present it to browser manufactures and standards groups.
This new found courage and social prowess from jQuery can be statistically traced back to almost a week ago, when web statistics company BuiltWith announced that the jQuery JavaScript Framework is now being used on more than 50% of the top 10,000 websites on the web, over 41% for the top 100,000 and over 31% on the top 1 million websites.
“Because jQuery is used by such a large percentage of sites [...], we have a good feel for what problems and challenges are commonly faced and what issues with existing implementations we need to try working around,” said Addy Osmani, jQuery developer, member of the Design and Content subteams.
With such a massive adoption, the jQuery Standards Team will have a strong word in the discussions, usually dominated by browser manufactures like Mozilla, Google or Microsoft.
The jQuery team hopes to leverage it's new found statistical glory and a solid relation with Mozilla to help front-end developers mend the web, improve the jQuery platform and create a better communication and feedback channel between standards bodies, the high ranked developers at browser companies and the web's foot soldiers, the developers themselves.
To guide this process, the Standards Team will be led by Yehuda Katz, a veteran in the jQuery, Merb and Ruby on Rails development teams.
He will be helped by fellow jQuery developer, renowned web personality Paul Irish, Google Chrome's dev relations representative and important contributor to some of the most important and widely used open source projects around, like Modernizr, HTML Boilerplate and CSS3 Please.
jQuery is available for download here.