The HTML Writers Guild

This is a preserved archive. The HTML Writers Guild merged into the International Webmasters Association on 30 August 2001 — now the International Web Association — and this site has not been maintained since. It is kept online as a record.

Nothing offered on these pages is available. Memberships cannot be joined, courses cannot be enrolled in, and the contact details shown are no longer in service.

About the Guild

The HTML Writers Guild was founded in 1994 and incorporated in 1996 as a 501(c)3 educational organization. It grew to more than 147,000 members in over 150 nations, and described itself as the largest international organization of web authors.

In its own words, the Guild existed

“to assist our members in developing and enhancing their capabilities as web authors, to compile and publicize information about standards, practices, techniques, competency, and ethics as applied to web authoring”

Quoted from the Guild’s FedWeb pages.

A voice in web standards

On 13 January 1998 the Guild joined the World Wide Web Consortium — the first organization of web designers to do so.

“This is an unprecedented opportunity for web designers to have a voice in developing the standards that fuel the World Wide Web. As an association of web designers on the ‘front lines’ of the World Wide Web revolution we have a unique perspective we can share with the industry leaders in the W3C — we are the ones who actually use the new technologies and standards they create.”

Press release, 23 February 1998. See the Guild’s W3C information page.

The Guild took part in the W3C’s HTML Working Group, and from June 2000 in the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Education and Outreach Working Group. Its own accessibility programme, the AWARE Center, ran alongside that work.

A short chronology

1994: The Guild is founded.
1996: Incorporated as a 501(c)3 educational organization.
January 1998: Joins the W3C, the first web designers’ organization to do so.
1998: The Guild’s online classes programme begins.
June 2000: Joins the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s Education and Outreach Working Group.
August 2001: Merges into the International Webmasters Association.
February 2005: The last messages are posted to the Guild’s mailing lists.

After the merger

Under the terms of the merger IWA assumed responsibility for all HWG operations, while preserving the Guild’s identity and programmes through a transition period under the direction of the HWG Board of Directors.

The association the Guild merged into was then the International Webmasters Association, the name used throughout the pages on this site. It has since become the International Web Association, which continues today.

The community outlasted the transition. The Guild’s mailing lists carried on for another three and a half years, with the last messages posted in February 2005. Its classes continued too, moving from the Guild’s own pages to eclasses.org, which ran the courses until it in turn closed.

The merger announcement is preserved in full: Press release, 30 August 2001.

What is preserved here

Mailing list archives — 82,731 messages across 20 lists, 1997 to 2005. The working conversation of the early web: markup, accessibility, browser incompatibility, standards, and the business of building sites.
The AWARE Center — Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education. The Guild’s web accessibility programme, including guidelines, evaluation work and teaching material.
W3C participation — how the Guild explained its consortium membership to its members, and which groups it sat on.
Project Gutenberg — the Guild’s collaboration on marking up public-domain texts.
Operations Center — press releases, board elections, events and the Guild’s own governance records.
Classes — the Guild’s online course programme, which it ran from 1998 before the courses moved to eclasses.org.
Resources and bookstore — reference material collected for members.
Membership pages — how the Guild described itself to prospective members.

The site over time

Only the last version of the Guild’s front page survives in this archive. The earlier ones are held by the Internet Archive, whose record of hwg.org begins in 1996:

November 1996 — the earliest capture that exists. The Guild is two years old and has just incorporated.
February 1998 — four weeks after joining the W3C.
September 2001 — twenty-six days after the merger.
2012 — the last version, preserved here in full. By then the domain was used mainly to promote web design courses, and the front page was written with search engines in mind. It is kept because it is part of what happened to the domain after the merger, though it is not what the HTML Writers Guild was.

There is no capture from 1994 or 1995: the Internet Archive did not begin collecting until 1996, two years after the Guild was founded.

Related archives

eclasses.org — the online course platform, also preserved and no longer running.
iwanet.org — the International Web Association, formerly the International Webmasters Association, which the Guild merged into and which continues today.