Re: Hippocratic Oath for Webmasters

Anthony Ettinger wrote:

> Starting from the ground up, this list should be a
> guideline. I'm not sure I like the "pledge" and
> "hippocratic oath" spin on it

Yes, I'd say the naming of it is a bit too ... self-inflated.
Now, if it were called "Good practice recommendations for
UK FE/HE web sites" instead it would go a lot further, in my
opinion.

1. I'd like to see the words "clean, structural and semantic
markup in there", even if it is as an explanation of what is
meant by "relevant standards". Also, just saying that the HTML
needs a DOCTYPE doesn't quite get to the heart of it...code that
validates against published standards.
"speech browser" ... would it not be better to mention screen
readers instead?

2. Define "meaningful". If you have a database driven section for,
say, news...would a URL including a numerical reference (provided
that it doesn't change, which is actually not that much of an
issue) to the news item be meaningful enough? Or are you suggesting
that, in this example, the URL should be changed to 
/news/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/URL_ENCODED_TITLE ?

7. Should that not be covered by your privacy policy? It does not
replace it, in any case.

8. Are you going to ensure that this happens throughout EVERYTHING?
A server completely failing, for instance?

More generally, I'd like to actually see a mention of the word
"accessible" in there. Also, many rules may benefit from a subtle
"we will *strive*" rather than absolute promises.

And definitely, cross references to the actual W3C documents and
any other supporting materials.

Overall, though, it seems to be a bit of a mixed bag of fairly
general points combined with some ultra-specific ones. Could it be
more than 10? Should it be less than 10? Why 10?

-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Tuesday, 22 November 2005 18:56:16 UTC