[111Design.ca]

111Design Consulting

Supporting Industry Standards and Accessibility [Navigation]

Menu

[Victorian gingerbread]

web design consulting

Content updated on: 2008/12/10

an introduction to web standards

It's estimated that 99 percent of all websites contain invalid, redundant and proprietary markup. In plain English, content is inaccessible to certain browsing devices. Some visitors may be unable to use, navigate or even enter it—its content could be virtually invisible.

Most websites are already obsolete. They are not compatible with modern web browsers. At some point they will cease to work on all but the most out-of-date software no longer supported by its developers.

Coding to Web Standards ensures both accessibility and forwards compatibility. If done right, legacy software support is not a problem. A good CSS layout will degrade gracefully.

The World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), whose founder invented the hyperlink—which lead to the invention of the Internet, created the Standards everyone who owns or designs a website should adhere to. W3C's members and supporters share a vision to bring the Web to its full potential, to make it work better than it does today for everyone, regardless of disablilty. In that spirit, we at 111Design believe that a website should never restrict access to, or place demands upon the user to re-configure his software, his senses or limbs.

Something you may not be aware of is that Web authoring tools which format text do not generate valid semantic markup. The result is pages that only work in a limited graphical environment. They can be inaccessible to:

Standards-compliant sites are:

Top

xhtml + css

When choosing a doctype, XHTML 1.0 Strict is best. All presentational markup is removed and controlled by cascading style sheets (CSS). Keeping the markup lean and clean makes updating content, even re-styling an entire site much easier. Only one file needs to be edited. No special software is needed to do this. Just a plain text editor like Windows Notepad. Colours, graphics, even the layout can be changed without having to recode individual pages.

XHTML + CSS sites consume less bandwidth and do not require multiple versions of each page for different media & different browsers. A good design will function properly in any environment. It will also make sense when style sheets and images are not loaded.

Top

site testing & assessment

We can show you what your design looks like in any browser. A Full Report includes screen captures, validation results, semantic errors, and accessibility issues that need to be addressed. "Accessibility/ Usability Only" Report includes:

There's no need to pay extra for "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO). XHTML + CSS layouts are structured to be search engine-friendly. There are a number of things content authors can do to improve their page rank and attract targeted traffic:

Some search engines only crawl pages to a depth of two levels up from the root directory. So it's possible some important pages won't get indexed. If the Site has many deeply linked pages, a Site Map (similar to a table of contents) will help both Search Engines and human visitors. A list of ordinary hypertext links and page titles will do. The Site map should list every public page on your domain, and each page should in turn link back to the Site map. This can be submitted to search engines in place of the index page.

Don't try to trick search engines with things like keyword SPAM or invisible text. Most will permanently remove the offending site and never crawl it again.

Below are some common "bad practices" which not only cause problems for search engines, pose a real problem for alternative browsing devices (small screen wireless devices included). These should naturally be avoided:

You can check any page for invalid markup by entering the URL in the box below:

Top

pricing

The cost for an Assessment is based on the number of HTML pages and style sheets you have. Please include the URL of your Index page or Site Map so we can get a general idea of its size. Our fee for Consulting is $85.00 (CDN) per hour. »*

Top

terminology

XHTML
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax. Whereas HTML is an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed (syntactically correct), XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using a standard XML library—unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser (though an SGML parser library could possibly be used). XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML. XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation on January 26, 2000. :::
CSS
In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). :::
Semantic (Web)
The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of the Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools. :::
Web Browser
An application used to access information on the World Wide Web.

Copyright © 2003-2009, 111Design.ca