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I am not blind, and IANAL, but I do have a physical disability and I'm very familiar with the ADA and Section 504. This particular article is about it's UK equivalent (much better, stronger, than the ADA).

The ADA's test is, did you provide "reasonable accomodation" to the disabled? Thus, would the amount of extra work/money you'd put in be reasonable?

For websites, check out the W3C's FAQ on the subject. Not much info on legal requirements, but on what makes a site accessible. Also check out Bobby (which has a link on that page), an accessibility validator, much like the W3C validator.

Basically, it boils down to some pretty simple stuff. Use ALT tags (HTML can be read by screenreaders) and watch out for color-blindness issues (no red/green, yellow/green, purple/blue, etc).

Right on the money. Anti-Slash also criticizes Slashdot for its lack of standards compliance. Yet, Anti-Slash itself is not HTML compliant.

Sure, it looks nice...

but does it validate?

A 199 Byte static webpage....

Another point where there is discrepincies, is if you have a table cell with the style: style="border: 1 solid #000000; width:100px;" In IE that cell will have a width of 100px, and a border. While in mozilla it will put the border on the outside of the cell. So it's actual width will be 102px;.

Yes, and that's exactly what the W3C specification says. Go look up the Box Model. If you don't find this intuitive, then you don't get it. Read it again until you do. And while you're at it, read the HTML and CSS specs as well and understand them.

I don't mean this harshly, it's just well-spirited advice which will greatly help you in designing sites and writing HTML and CSS which is valid and works cross-browser. It's really not that hard, if you look at it closely. Writing shell scripts is much harder and I assume most people here find shell scripts trivial. (So do I.)

[Tim Berners-Lee] works from several criteria: the system must be flexible and designed with minimal constraint so that it is compatible with numerous languages and operating systems; the system must be capable of recording random links between objects; and the system must be constructed so that entering and correcting information is easily performed.

[Tim Berners-Lee] works from several criteria: the system must be flexible and designed with minimal constraint so that it is compatible with numerous languages and operating systems; the system must be capable of recording random links between objects; and the system must be constructed so that entering and correcting information is easily performed.

Would it be terribly difficult to implement a system like whois.sc, where it shows images of your email address instead of text?

Yes, in the United States, at least. Are you familiar with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

Rendering slashdot correctly is by no means the correct way to judge a browser. That's like saying that since IE renders my bank's site correctly, all other browsers are bad. Slashdot is truly coded incredibly shittily. Go ahead and run it through the validator

As for mozilla re-implementing their own widgets. That was the ONLY way to make it truly cross-platform. It's not "just a browser". It's an entire cross-platform runtime environment, that can be used to quickly and efficiently develop advanced cross-platform web applications.

Why are you asking me? The specification is available to everyone. It says that negative margins are implementation-specific. I'm not sure what you mean by "negative border offsets", it's not normal CSS terminology. Are you talking about padding? The CSS 1 specification explicitly forbids negative padding.

But people have not agreed on any standard, and even if they did there is little chance most sites would change to follow it.

Uhh, hello? Right here. People don't follow it because browsers don't support it (Mozilla does but it's turned off by default I think; Firefox, Safari and MSIE don't; Opera supports Next but doesn't appear to support other buttons well).

w3 validator on example.com

Someone should be ashamed of themselves.

I've long wished this were the case, but it's not really possible the way things work right now. Remember how logins used to pop up that little dialogs box for user and password? That's good old HTTP authentication, which is codified in the HTTP standard with well-defined response codes that let the browser know if the login was successful or not. But you just don't see those used anymore (for good reasons), so instead we have all these form-based logins that just return web pages that say whether or not the login worked. Unfortunately, there's no good way for Mozilla to look at these pages and determine whether or not the login was successful, so it just has to guess.

Perhaps an extension to add special HTTP headers on the status of login attempts could solve this problem, but until then, Mozilla can't really do much better than assuming it worked.

People regard their privacy highly and are reluctant to provide their personal information to websites. Website which need personal details from its users have to convince a new user that it won't misuse the data that it has. This is usually made with a statement, known as Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policies have problems. First, they are usually written in a legal language incomprehensible to a lay person. Second, people have no way of knowing that website in fact follows the policy it has.

One way of assuring people might be machine readable privacy policies. P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) is W3C framework for such privacy protocol. It allows user to store his personal data to a P3P agent, which will then follow the user given rules to share private information.

This agent should be implemented to firefox and it could use a machine learning to automate further the interactions with websites. The agent could for example learn, that if website's privacy policy promises to use user's e-mail address only for initial consistency check and to send a forgetten password if user explicitly asks for it, the agent can give it to the website without prompting the user.

Of course, this won't solve the problem of malicious websites which don't follow their privacy policies, but is a step into right direction where privacy policies are certified and their enforcing is auditted.

If you want to be a coder speaking the truth, you could try to be informed first.

The philosophy of only coding for what browsers can handle is a noble one... and one that, as far as I know, every sane web developer has been doing as long as the field has existed... who wants to code for non-existent clients?

As for your description of that as "Just HTML", that's Just Wrong. The W3C standards are, currently, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0.

The W3C has long been advocating HTML/XHTML for markup and CSS for layout/design, pretty much since that paradigm was invented (or reinvented) by them. The W3C standards have evolved a bit since you've last checked. Your assumption was:

W3C standard: HTML 4.0
Browser Proprietary Stuff: everything else

However, there's a very different story today:
W3C standards: XHTML 1.0-1.1, CSS 1.0-2.0, SVG
Used by browsers commonly, but not W3C compliant: JavaScript (or JScript), DHTML, Java (not so much anymore)... I think that's about it.

The only designers not following your advice are those coding for Internet Explorer and not for Mozilla or for W3C standards.

If you want to be a coder speaking the truth, you could try to be informed first.

The philosophy of only coding for what browsers can handle is a noble one... and one that, as far as I know, every sane web developer has been doing as long as the field has existed... who wants to code for non-existent clients?

As for your description of that as "Just HTML", that's Just Wrong. The W3C standards are, currently, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0.

The W3C has long been advocating HTML/XHTML for markup and CSS for layout/design, pretty much since that paradigm was invented (or reinvented) by them. The W3C standards have evolved a bit since you've last checked. Your assumption was:

W3C standard: HTML 4.0
Browser Proprietary Stuff: everything else

However, there's a very different story today:
W3C standards: XHTML 1.0-1.1, CSS 1.0-2.0, SVG
Used by browsers commonly, but not W3C compliant: JavaScript (or JScript), DHTML, Java (not so much anymore)... I think that's about it.

The only designers not following your advice are those coding for Internet Explorer and not for Mozilla or for W3C standards.

I think you'll find that CSS is a set of W3C defined standards ;)

SVG is a W3C recommendation.

Says the MSDN article:

Does your Web site contain files with file extensions that do not match their Content-Type?

If your site serves files that are handled by mime-handlers, the file extensions on those files should correspond to the same ProgID as the mime-handler. If the Content-type ProgID for a given file does not match the file extension ProgID, Internet Explorer in XP SP2 may take the following actions: 1) the user may be prompted to download the file and 2) the file will not be executed in the extension-handler if it fails to execute in the mime-handler.

You can correct these mismatches by changing the content-type to match the file extension. Be sure this is true for your Web pages as well. Exception: This change does not affect cases where a "content-disposition=attachment" header is sent. In those cases, the file name or extension suggested by the server is considered final and is not changed based on Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) sniffing.

Versus the spec (emphasis mine):

Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD treat it as type "application/octet-stream".

Fortunately both the HTTP spec and the article think URLs have extensions. *bangs head against wall*.

-- Arien

However, when I use Safari (which I thought was loosely based on the Mozilla project's browser engine), I see even more rendering problems than in the other two browsers.

My suggestion is that you run the "problem" pages through the W3 Validator before suspecting a particular browser's implementation.

Apple also continues to improve Safari's compliance with web standards, fixing a number of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and rendering bugs and supporting more of the recently approved CSS 2 standard.

For all the talk of "web standards", CSS is actually a recommendation, not a standard. Tim Berners-Lee makes it very clear that the W3C was founded to produce recommendations and not to be a standards body in his book, Weaving The Web.

Furthermore, the CSS 2 recommendation was approved over six years ago, and the CSS 2.1 specification has not yet been approved as a recommendation (it's still in candidate recommendation stage).

Apple also continues to improve Safari's compliance with web standards, fixing a number of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and rendering bugs and supporting more of the recently approved CSS 2 standard.

For all the talk of "web standards", CSS is actually a recommendation, not a standard. Tim Berners-Lee makes it very clear that the W3C was founded to produce recommendations and not to be a standards body in his book, Weaving The Web.

Furthermore, the CSS 2 recommendation was approved over six years ago, and the CSS 2.1 specification has not yet been approved as a recommendation (it's still in candidate recommendation stage).

Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.

huh. who knew I'd spark all this debate with an off-hand comment? interesting and amazing.

As much as I appreciate Google as the wonderful tool that it indeed is, I can't afford to think of it as the "be all end all" repository of human knowledge. It maybe the closest thing to the Library of Alexandria we have in modern civilzation. Seemingly more than most, but at that not even close to a "deep web" search engine because that problem as yet hasn't been adequately formulated yet. Tim Berners Lee and crew as well as a great many others are, no doubt, hard at work on the case.

But until the semantic web (or some alternative approach) emerges and is accepted and becomes a reality for most, all that even the best search engines are currently capable of doing is skimming over roughly the top 5% of the entire sum of knowledge and information on the web. It's the same problem that Dr. Bush addressed in his famous paper but on a much grander scale than perhaps even he could imagine.

From serendipit-e:

Firstly, it's worth remembering that Google only indexes a third of the web's nine billion pages. That it does so as comprehensively, if not more so, than anyone else, isn't at issue. Information costs money, and this has taken the sheen off the 'Internet' as it was once sold to us. The most valuable collections limit their access, for very good economic reasons: they can't afford not to.

The best collections are Web-accessible, after a fashion. For example, San Francisco Library's public collections are one of the Web's treasures - and accessible to any visitor who takes time to pick up a Library card - but beyond the crawlers. They represent the tip of the iceberg of the Internet that Google can't see - but that the rest of us can enjoy.

However this brain drain, this emptying of the commons simply isn't what we were promised ten years ago, when the Internet was first sold to the public as, amongst other things, an almost infinite source of information. Ten years on, the reality hasn't lived up to the promise, and as Net Time co-founder Geert Lovink pointed out in a panel on Saturday, and as we've noted too, Internet usage in the West is stalling. The public is not stupid, and is now reaching for the off switch.

While it isn't exactly fair to blame Google for this. Google has succeeded in becoming the branding for the Great Internet Project. But obviously, it can't be responsible for the content, which leaves us all somewhat underwhelming. But the corporation continues to highlight the metaphysical properties of its technology with some absurd claims, and at the very least, encourages commentators to describe its collection as something it isn't.

I can definetly appreciate the value of having multiple sources for your information. But as far as I'm aware, only the OED is the accepted standard for defining both current and historical usage of any word or term. The OED does not seek to impose their views on anyone, the approach I appreciate the most. They merely preserve past meanings based upon historical documents and glean neologisms emerging from popular useage. C

I coded the output in standards-compliant XHTML 1.1 ... Later someone who actually uses IE tried to use my little web app, and found gray background squares around all my supposedly transparent-backgrounded images.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but if this is the case, your output probably wasn't standards-compliant XHTML 1.1. Please see this note on XHTML Media Types. The media type text/html (which is most likely what you were using) SHOULD NOT be used with XHTML 1.1 of any kind. Instead, application/xhtml+xml should be used.

As IE tends to pop up a download dialog when it encounters an application/* media type, application/xhtml+xml will make the site unviewable by the IE user so he or she would never actually see the background squares.

You'd think that a geek CMS system would recognize the importance of being standards compliant.

Unfortunately /. isn't alone in using invalid and outdated code. Both Kuro5hin (scoop) and Metafilter crap out too.

I'm not in any way related to them, but Drupal not only validates, but is XTML 1.0 Strict!

ROFL

Slashdot doesn't even use HTML properly. The coding of this site is a joke, wrt standards, as has been noted elsewhere.

.

There's the link tag for html headers, which specifies the next page, previous page, and things like that.

Ah, I knew it was too good an idea to be all my own! For those not aware of how to use the link element for that, I found this page as well as this one. I don't know how widely it is used by site designers, and I can't say I know of any web browsers that use it, but I would say it is definitely something a proxy server should be taking advantage of. It's use is even stated directly in the second document:

User agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to reduce the perceived load time.

There's the link tag for html headers, which specifies the next page, previous page, and things like that.

Ah, I knew it was too good an idea to be all my own! For those not aware of how to use the link element for that, I found this page as well as this one. I don't know how widely it is used by site designers, and I can't say I know of any web browsers that use it, but I would say it is definitely something a proxy server should be taking advantage of. It's use is even stated directly in the second document:

User agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to reduce the perceived load time.

Remind your boss that the reason the sites look so terrible in non-IE browsers is because the sites do not conform to WWW standards. By insisting IE continue to be used indicates Microsoft should dictate what websites should look like, not the Internet inventors themselves. Surely he or she can agree that Microsoft should not be given that power. Thus, sticking to IE is not a solution, rather it contributes to the problem.

Yeah maybe one uses Linux and the other is MS, but both of their developers can't code worth beans

John Kerry W3C

George Bush W3C

Yeah maybe one uses Linux and the other is MS, but both of their developers can't code worth beans

John Kerry W3C

George Bush W3C

the w3c tip index is my favorite usability resource. the word of mr nielsen is second. not quite everything nielsen says is right in every situation but everything the w3c suggests is a suggest worth the weight of my toshiba laptop (a hefty 7 pounds) in gold.

if you had RTFA, or even read anything in the last 20 years, you would probably know that XML != RDF. there is a XML implementation of RDF, called (duh) rdfxml, but that's far from the only way to describe RDF data. I have to agree though that rdfxml is one of the worst ways to do RDF.

have a look at N3 or ntriples for starters.

if you had RTFA, or even read anything in the last 20 years, you would probably know that XML != RDF. there is a XML implementation of RDF, called (duh) rdfxml, but that's far from the only way to describe RDF data. I have to agree though that rdfxml is one of the worst ways to do RDF.

have a look at N3 or ntriples for starters.

I noticed the article made no mention of Pike (also the name of a fish - see language logo). Pike's a fine C-like scripting language ...that I know extremely poorly myself, but anyway..

From Pike's official homepage (at the University of Linkoping, Sweden):

The release of Pike 7.6 marks the first results of a long-running project to make Pike the first scripting language for the Semantic Web. The current highlight in that respect is the support for W3C's standard formats RDF and OWL.

Worth downloading and checking out for other reasons than "just" RDF & OWL. Free software, available under LGPL, GPL, and MPL (Mozilla Public License).

RDF does not equal XML. RDF is a way to express relationship through graphs. RDF/XML is one way to express these relationships, but there are other ways too. I thought that RDF always had to be expressed with XML too, but then I read the
RDF primer. At first I thought it was extremely overcomplicated, but after reading some more I started to grasp the concepts. And they are not about storage formats. They are about semantics.

• A List Apart (good site to read, too!)
• kernel.org

• Art and the Zen of Web Sites (good info, though)
• and everybody's favorite, Google

• A List Apart (good site to read, too!)
• kernel.org

• Art and the Zen of Web Sites (good info, though)
• and everybody's favorite, Google

"I think "Looks best in Firefox and other Standards Compliant Browsers" logos might not be so bad"

You mean something like the logos at the bottom of this page.

"Someone should patent 'a method and system for incorrect display of PNG alpha channels coupled with mangling of CSS', and then sue Micro$oft for infringement."

You're forgetting about prior art. I think Microsoft has too much for anyone to get a patent on that now. :)

Does anyone else find it somewhat offputting that they include links to both validate their XHTML and validate their CSS on the bottom of their homepage, yet both return a number of errors stating that their page is neither valid XHTML nor uses valid CSS?

Even more oddly, for a brief instant when I went to their homepage, I got a default Apache index listing, rather than their homepage. It included links to things such as their PHP MyAdmin directory, a number of PHP files, and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.

Does anyone else find it somewhat offputting that they include links to both validate their XHTML and validate their CSS on the bottom of their homepage, yet both return a number of errors stating that their page is neither valid XHTML nor uses valid CSS?

Even more oddly, for a brief instant when I went to their homepage, I got a default Apache index listing, rather than their homepage. It included links to things such as their PHP MyAdmin directory, a number of PHP files, and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.

Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links are functioning properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and users may not be able to reach all of your pages. For more information about correct HTML syntax, see the HTML 4.01 Specification.

Validation by W3.org for www.microsoft.com and another for their new search engine

Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links are functioning properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and users may not be able to reach all of your pages. For more information about correct HTML syntax, see the HTML 4.01 Specification.

Validation by W3.org for www.microsoft.com and another for their new search engine

Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links are functioning properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and users may not be able to reach all of your pages. For more information about correct HTML syntax, see the HTML 4.01 Specification.

Validation by W3.org for www.microsoft.com and another for their new search engine

Um, the object element is part of the HTML 4.01 specification.

Actually it is the reverse, NS7 and Moz1.8a1 render the object tag, which is valid HTML4.0 strict/XHTML1.0 strict perfectly

NS4.80 does what it should when you can't render an object, render the content that the object surrounds

IE6sp1 fails to render the object or the alternative, see for yourself here.

Ahem, here.

That's utter bullshit. The W3C has not published any sort of specification that details how plugins are supposed to interact with browsers. You are talking out of your arse.

If you think otherwise, please provide a link to the relevent specification. They are all available at w3.org.

for shame