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Wednesday, 18th October 2006, No Comments »

Draft version of the web guidelines v3

I really like the direction this draft seems to be aiming the guidelines towards, a nice set ‘checklistable’ and verifiable guidelines which will edge us towards the semantic web. Good work all round.

The guidelines document

While I like most of the changes and the direction the SCC is going for with the new version of the guidelines document, I would like chapter 3 to follow some of it’s own rules by ‘Dividing large blocks of information into more manageable groups where natural and appropriate‘. I also think it would be worth removing ’self referrals’ for example, Ref 6.3.6f and Ref 6.3.6g could perhaps be better delivered by combing these recommendation under one heading of ‘File Naming’ and linking to the recommendation in the web strategy section.

I assume, since this is a draft, that a reference convention is still yet to be finalised so that we don’t have multiple “Ref f” or missing anchors to specific guidelines.

Specific guidlines

Regarding Testing (Ref 6.5f) & Browers/Operating Systems (Ref 6.5g), can I ask how these browsers were decided on and how this 96% figure was determined? Is there some kind of cross agency browser statistics list that was used and can we (the industry) see it? Also how and when will newer browsers such as Safari 2 and Internet Explorer 7 be added? Also, could we consider a table similar to Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support as a way of showing browser support?

Dynamic Content (Ref i), seems confused and incorrect between the WAI checkpoint which it’s based on and the guideline which starts talking about RSS. The Standard is based on the motion of elements within a page, not the dynamic creation of content (such as sparklines for the stock market) or the syndication of content (RSS). If RSS ‘technically comes under the title of “moving content”‘ I would see all content that could be updated as technically falling under this guideline, thus the entire website.

Writing Content (Ref 6.4.6n), can we drop this ‘add a space at the end’ business? I understand the rationale for having a full stop, a sentence does require it, but a space for assistive technologies? Nope. I’d appreciate seeing any research you have to the contrary

Images (Ref g) I think has a bad example, but not the way you think:

<img src="../images/header_nav.gif" alt="SSC Main Menu (links of this image map are available at the bottom of the page" ismap>

We (web designers) shouldn’t be dictating or telling people where ’spatially’ on the page something is and that these links should be placed where approprate to the document hierarchy.

Under Rich Internet Applications, Ruby on Rails is incorrectly lumped in with Ajax and DHTML. Ruby on Rails is a server-side framework like .Net, Java, PHP and Python. I realise that you’ve borrowed this quote from the WAI-ARIA press release, but it does not include Ruby on Rails. I assume this is a simple copy error.

Guideline extras

A couple of side notes, are we required to vaildate our RSS feeds? Maybe? Perhaps? A simple link to http://validator.w3.org/feed/ just to be sure?

Also, while I realise that they don’t have any real formal W3C backing, like say RSS, nor have they been around for that long, but perhaps the mention of microformats and WHATWG with Web Applications 1.0 could be used as an idea of consistant structural mark-up across agencies?