Re: New version of Quality Tips for Webmaster

scripsit Terje Bless:
> Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@optimalco.com> wrote:
> 
> >Thank you, Karl. ;)  Maybe I should have mentioned that I've given
> >seminars on WCAG with valid HTML/CSS, so I'm pretty familiar with the
> >distinction.
> 
> Speaking of which, do we still fails as miserably to be accessible as we
> used to? I'm little by little aproaching the stage where I feel there is
> any use to soliciting accessability review of the site and anything I can
> catch beforehand is a definite advantage.

I certainly would not say ``miserably''!  I haven't done an exhaustive
evaluation, but there sure don't seem to be any Priority 1 or 2
problems.  I just ran it on Bobby [1] and the only specific complaints
Bobby had were priority 3, mostly of the ``until user agents...'' type,
which aren't so much a problem now than in 1999.  A very easy fix would
be to add lang="en" and xml:lang="en" to the document (<html>) element.

Adding <acronym> markup would take care of another, and is pretty easy
to do on static HTML files with a script or whatever (e.g.,
s#XHTML#<acronym title="eXtensible HyperText Markup
Language">XHTML</acronym>#g).  In my Perl CGIs, I just define
file-scoped scalars holding the acronym expansions, then use
double-quote interpolation to put the acronym expansions into strings.
E.g.:

my $HTML = '<acronym title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</acronym>';
...
print $q->p("$HTML is the markup language used for Web pages.");

> I like to think that Validator performs well in anything from Lynx, through
> Netscape 4.x, and up to MSIE/Mozilla of later revisions. It does this by
> withholding CSS from Netscape 4.x (dull but functional) and being pragmatic
> about structure to make sure everyone gets something usable. All tricks to
> achieve "prettyness" are in CSS (*not* in the structure) so CSS browsers
> get them and everyone else just gets the meat.

Hurray for Strict!  I haven't been able to get people to accept Strict
yet around here...there are too may folks using NS4 that want
pixel-perfect graphical layout.  I would dearly love to put something
like the ``Why does this page render badly?'' note on my work, but I'd
offend important people.

Heck, sometimes I have to consider it a victory when we don't lock up
the navigation with Java or JavaScript.

References

1.
<http://bobby.cast.org/bobby/bobbyServlet?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2F&output=Submit&gl=wcag1-aaa>

-- 
Thanasis Kinias
Web Developer, Information Technology
Graduate Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

Ash nazg durbatulūk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulūk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 17:40:05 UTC