Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Dennis Lee <dennisle swbell net>]

Iain wrote:

> >   Basically our web site is looking like a assertion that the Gnome
> > project don't care about standards compliance. Let's take our main
> > web page and try to check it's conformance:
>
>
> Basically it's not.
> How many people run a validator on sites they go to? I would imagine a
> VERY VERY small minority.
> It's not like someone's going to come upon the site and say "Hmm, this
> GNOME thing looks damn cool, but awwww, their site doesn't validate, I'm
> not touching that".
>
> So basically, I think having a standards compliant website, while nice,
> isn't all that important, and there's far more important things to do
> with the website. It's definatly not "an embarassment" or whatever Telsa
> claimed it was.
>
> Plus, that Bobby thing just gets anal to stupid extremes. The last site
> I wrote and ran through it, I was marked down because I didn't include
> the size of images in the alt tag. (NB, some of the Bobby things are
> useful, but not all of them.)

If the site meets standards; it will not matter what user agent calls 
for the page they will be able to view it (hear it). Image size tags are 
not anal to a retentive web master who wants his pages to load as fast 
as possable. A good browser reads size tags and lays a page out around 
that size while the image down loads. Back not so long ago when I was on 
a modem it made a differnce I could see on. If nothing else alt tags 
tell a user on a slow modem what an image is so he make a choose to down 
load the image or not.

In the USA it is now requried for a site to meet 
www.access-board.gov/news/508-final.htm
before they can do bizz with the gov or recive public funding.
Do you want to end looking like the Olympic Committee and getting the 
Gnome foundation sued by someone. Please read 
http://www.contenu.nu/socog.html

It is a whole lot easer to do it right now than to go back and fix it later.

Dennis