[thelist] What does standard compliance actually mean?

aardvark evolt at roselli.org
Thu Oct 6 09:27:15 CDT 2005


On 6 Oct 2005 at 15:20, Andreas Wahlin wrote:

> To many, standard compliance seem to mean stuff like "semantic web"  
> and sometimes even "unobtrusive scripting/graceful degradation". But  
> doesen't standard compliance just mean that you follow your declared  
> doctype and validate against the w3c validator, not that I  
> automaticly write insanely great webpages (from a code view)?
> This may be a bit of a philosophical discussion of course ...

initially, yes, which is a problem...

internally, i've tried to distill it down... we have internal 
standards... my people have to meet those, and those are made up of 
the following:

- W3C HTML 4.01 Trans validation (some exceptions are allowed, but 
must be documented)
- W3C CSS 2.1 validation
- WAI WCAG 1.0 minimum A compliance
- Section 508 compliance

those are the 'standards' to which we adhere... i also have other 
internal published standards here that cover things like:

- appropriate use of HTML elements (semantic, structural, 
simplification)
- appropriate use of CSS
- naming conventions (for classes, ids, forms, pages, files, etc.)
- accessibility statement
- UK accessibility-style accesskeys
- overall page file size (including images, script, css, etc.)
- overall page pixel size
- forms layout
- code formatting (spaces, indents, etc.)
- JS testing
- browser testing
- UI guidelines for applications / Flash / etc.
- some default page content (404, error, etc.)
- overall simplicity (strive to make it as simple as possible)

obviously a lot of this requires hands-on review... but that allows 
me to constantly refine and re-test these internal standards... and 
it allows everyone else to learn them and contribute feedback...

for example, it is my standard that we will not create a page that 
has content that jumps from an h1 to an h3 -- the h2 must not be 
skipped... back in the day, rudy and i used to spar on this 
regularly, which helped me refine that requirement internally...

also, the W3C validator sometimes changes its rules... it's important 
to have a test page you can run through regularly to see how it 
handles pages (it recently decided my doctypes are not valid, even 
though they were validated when my site relaunched in april)...

> If anyone could support their views with articles, I'd appreciate it  
> greatly :)

sure, just look at everything i've written on evolt.org, and the 
books where i have written some chapters... how's that for a cop-out?

> (yes, I'm writing a master's thesis)

eek... well, good luck with that...



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