Wednesday, 21st March 2007, No Comments »
New version of the e-government standards
Not guidelines anymore, but standards!
The NZ Government Web Standards and Recommendations v1.0 officially launched today.
The biggest changes, barring the name change from guidelines to standards, is the focus on removing duplications and dated material, and focussing on making the standards more useable by government agencies. Part of that usable approach has been splitting out the required from the recommended and creating examples for some of the more trickier standards. The examples sit under the Assistance with NZ Government Web Standards and Recommendations section.
Where’s the controversy?
I’d stay Minimum web browsers and their respective versions for sites to work in and it’s associated recommendation 18.1.1 Operating Systems and Device types for sites to work on could be a source of much discussion amongst web designers, developers and government web teams.
Basically it requires a government agency to create a minimum list of web browser types and their corresponding version combinations. This is to be derived from those vistors that make up 1% or more of the total web browser types/versions that have been used by users accessing the homepage of the ‘Main’ agency web site of the agency over a 12 month period.
This list would then require web designers and developers to QA against it as part of their development process. It’s gonna be very interesting to see what happens with this standard and how everyone is gonna deal with it.
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