HTML and web standards

Authoring Standards

Why have standards?

The Internet is a WORLD-WIDE communication medium. It is accessed by people who speak different languages and who use different tools to access the Internet. Use of the WORLD WIDE WEB is the main way people access the Internet.

People who want to access information need to be able to:

• obtain the information they want
• in the language of their choosing
• using their computer (or other device) of choice
• regardless of any disability they might have

The standards as laid down by the WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM, w3.org, attempt to fulfill these requirements. Full information is available from their website and is actually pretty easy to follow.

How does this apply to my website?

Validate

First and foremost, the HTML used to produce your website must VALIDATE so that there is the greatest likelihood that visitors to your site will be able to access all it has to offer.

Optimise

File sizes should be the smallest possible, including images. Unecessarily large images take longer to download and visitors might not wait. Even valid code can be unnecessarily cumbersome. It takes a human to trim unnecessary VALID HTML code.

Navigate

The site should be easy to navigate, FOR ALL PEOPLE. There is a tendency these days to use cool looking DROP-DOWN navigation bars or menus. Usually they are made with a series of IMAGES OF WORDS, not actually text. Screen readers as used by blind people can't read images. Not much good to someone who can't see and is relying on their computer SPEAKING the page content to them. For this reason I recommend the use of text based navigation systems. They can be made to look pretty cool using Cascading Style Sheets, and everyone can access them.

Design Standards

What is the difference?

Authoring standards provide the maximum accessibility to all people, and are defined by the current HTML standards.

Design standards provide maximum useability and appeal for the target audience. They are not written down and may be set by the website owner and/or author. A graphic artist might consider it unnecessary to allow for a blind person's screen reader, because that person is unlikely to visit their site.

There are however some rule-of-thumb design considerations for a web site:

• A web page normally appears focussed on the top left corner. That is where vital information will normally be placed:
  • Company logo
  • Link to home page
• Next most important information, usually navigation system, will be placed near the top and/or left of the page
• Most people read the screen as they do a book, downwards. It is considered bad form to have a page where the viewer must scroll sideways.
• A lot of content should be spread over a number of pages, or the page should be divided into logical sections. I have designed this page specifically like this to demonstrate the concept. In general:
  • images are slow to download and a number of images should be spread over a number of pages
  • text is fast to download and can be more efficient when on one page, provided it is divided into sections, with navigation within the page.
• Information that is intended to be printed, eg, paper brochures, should be offered in a downloadable format such as Portable Document Format. PDF retains the formatting as intended, including fonts which might not be resident on the receiver's computer. HTML is designed to look good on a wide variety of screens with different users' preferences. It is not meant to look good, precisely formatted, on a printed page.

Testing

• It is a sad fact that most browsers can sometimes have trouble displaying valid code correctly.
• It is not good enough to publish a website that looks good in one browser and expect it to look good in all browsers.
• Neither is it good enough to publish a website that simply validates, without testing it in a number of browsers.

What do I do?

• Validation:
  • I test the code in BBEdit, my web authoring text editor - it has an excellent code checking function
  • I view the pages in iCab, a neat little browser that also has a code checking function
  • I test the code at the w3.org validator, the definitive guide
• Testing:
  • I view the pages in the following browsers:
    • Internet Explorer
    • Netscape 7
    • Netscape 4
    • Mozilla
    • Safari
    • Opera
    • OmniWeb
    • Lynx
• Consideration:
  • No web author can guarantee their web pages will display correctly in all browsers and across all platforms
  • I do however try very hard to ensure maximum accessibility within the constraints imposed by the various browsers.