Re: Slashdot: How should Govt sites be designed?

> 
> Those of you on the other side of the pond may be interested to take 
> a look at the UK government's main public site: 
> http://www.open.gov.uk/  It claims 'WAI-AAA' standard of 

This is the page that made me ask about procedures for dealing with
false AAA claims, some months ago (although I didn't name it at the
time).  I did report the violations to them at the time.

It has changed since then, and, at least at one stage, did subsequently
validate against its DTD.  However, the last time I looked at it with IE,
they had messed up a table with the result that some of the heading (which
are not marked up as HTML headings!) were displayed with almost
overlapping characters, as the browser tried to minimise the overflow
of the table cell.

This last problem was there for several weeks, and may still be there,
even though I provided feedback.  (I've just looked with NS 4, and it
looks different; I don't know if this is because of NS not propagating
the backgrounds to the full width on the headings, or whether it is
a re-design.  The source looks familiar in the area of the headings, so
I think it may just be NS that makes it look different.  The headings
still aren't real HTML headings.)

I also wonder about the copyright/trademark implications of their using
reduced images of the self certification stickers, not to mention that
they become difficult to read in graphic form.

The title simply duplicates the URL.

It's better than the legislation web site, which uses HTML almost
exclusively for its formatting side effects, rather than its specified
semantics.

Received on Thursday, 14 December 2000 19:22:00 UTC