[thelist] accessibility: suggestions/recommendations for commercial site and coding standard

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Fri May 31 15:06:00 CDT 2002


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On Friday, May 31, 2002, at 08:50  pm, Chris W. Parker wrote:

> i can understand using XHTML/CSS (no tables, etc., validation) on a
> personal site seeing as how the person making the site might not care
> whether or not it works for everyone. or for that matter looks good in
> every viewers browser.
>
> but i'm working on a commercial site right now and it currently doesn't
> use any doctype or validation or any sort of standard for that matter
> (it hasn't gone live yet.) the problem is that i've taken the homepage
> and recoded a test version that validates in HTML 4.01. now although it
> looks fine in ie6, mozilla 1, ns6 and opera 6, it looks like shit in
> ns4.x. the old version of the homepage that didn't adhere to any
> standards and used a crappy css file looks better than the "new and
> improved" experimental page.
>
> so, what would you people suggest i do? it's not really viable to go
> back and redesign the site to better fit the standards, so i need to
> either keep it the old way, or... or i don't know what.

Chris

I think you've got a 2 stage job.

1) Do the tidies of the CSS file and ensure it validates at least
HTML4.01 now. As part of that, make sure it also validates WAI level A.
While you're doing that, see what other WAI issues there are, and do a
prioritisation based on WAI priority levels and ease of changing.

2) Next time you're revisiting the design or back end in a major way,
use that opportunity to redevelop the coding style, based on what the
current position is at that point, including user penetration of NS4.x.
That's what I did with my own site btw - when I was redeveloping the
backend from every page being XSSI/hand-coded to running a
template-based Content Management System (mmmm Zope), I took the
opportunity to redevelop the templates.

Because things do move on - a year ago, I would have fought tooth and
nail (and did so) against a client's design agency suggesting a CSS-P
solution. Now? I'd have some hard questions about how they were going
about it [1], but wouldn't be against it in principle.

Cheers
Martin

[1] One of those questions being "so how is it going to work for NS4.x?"
_______________________________________________
email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID:	0xA835CCCB
	martin at members.evolt.org      snailmail:	30 Shandon Place
   tel:	+44 (0)774 063 9985				Edinburgh,
   url:	http://www.easyweb.co.uk			Scotland
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