Re: Website ideas

["Simon J. Hernandez" <simon w3 org>]

On 18 Nov 2000, Ryan Muldoon wrote:

[Content elided]

> I think that before we even reach a "story board" stage, we need to
discuss some
> basic physical layout issues.  In my last email I proposed an initial structure
> proposal, and was hoping that it would foster some discussion, but so far, there
> haven't been any comments.  It seems as though we have some people that are good
> at organizing information nicely.  Once we are able to do this, it is much easier
> to go about solving our other problems.  I'm eager to hear proposals on actual
> structure/content organization.  This is an important issue, before we even begin
> to talk about templates, or what language we want to implement things in, if we
> want to use SQL, etc. Are there any thoughts on this matter?

Thank you Ryan for bringing this up.  It seems, before any real
development takes place, it might be interesting to pursue a thread on
what design philosophy the site seeks to pursue, i.e., will the site be
HTML 4.0 (4.01) compliant?  Will the site be designed and coded to allow
accessibility for those with disabilities?  This can be a model site
without having to jump through too many hoops, and at the same time be
easily manageable.  This is an exciting new beginning, and I believe if
this considerations can be worked in early on, it could make a lot of
thins easier to implement.  Using valid HTML makes focusing on particular
browser much less of an issue, and really irrelevant.  All good HTML
should be cleanly viewable through any compliant browser.

I do not mean to slow things down, as I realize there is a desire for
rapid development.  What does everyone think about these issues?

References:

1.  http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
2.  http://www.w3.org/WAI


Simon J. Hernandez


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