Sophia Antipolis, September 2006

Modern Web standards in SEMIDE portals

Miruna Bădescu

Finsiel Romania

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Web Accessibility The site information must be accessible to:

all users, including users with physical, mental or technical disabilities

all types of devices (different browsers, PDAs and mobile phones, TVs, speech synthesizers, Braille interpreters, TVs, printers, etc.)

other web sites, web applications and search engines

WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) – guidelines discussing accessibility issues and providing accessible design solutions

There are three levels of conformance: WAI A Conformance Level "A“ (used in CHM for administration

functionalities) WAI AA Conformance Level "Double-A" (used in CHM for end users

interface) WAI AAA Conformance Level "Triple-A“; the most strict

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Accessibility - Further reading

http://diveintoaccessibility.org/http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Full WAI standards description for all the three levels of conformance:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/complete.html http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/

complete.html#cklist (check list)

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Usability

Ensuring a “Easy to use” (or “User friendly”) interface supposes to:improve the website navigation (ex: search, sitemap)

improve the user orientation within the site (ex: bread crumb trail)

improve user control and flexibility (ex: language option)

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Usability - Further reading

http://www.useit.com/http://www.usableweb.com/

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Semantic HTML“Semantic Web” refers to Machine-Understandable

information

Semantically correct HTML is important - thinking on how applications (Google for instance) interpret it, more than how users view it

Use the proper HTML tags for certain types of information use of <h1>,<h2> tags for headings, use of <table> only for tabular

information and NOT for the layout design... etc.

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Semantic HTML - Further reading

http://www.ermanz.govt.nz/news-events/archives/presentations/semantichtml.html

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

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XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language)

XHTML is a family of document types that reproduce and extend HTML4 and are XML-based

XHTML documents are XML conforming (is designed to work with XML-based user agents and can be validated using XML tools)

Can utilize applications (e.g. scripts and applets) that rely oneither the HTML Document Object Model or the XML Document Object Model

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XHTML - Further reading

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

Validation service http://validator.w3.org/

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CSS2 The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used for the graphical

presentation of website layouts.

Target! Complete separation of the structure from presentation – the CSS should have absolute control over the appearance.

CSS level 2

is used in two major directions: for the elements positioning and for their stylization

builds on CSS1 and, with very few exceptions, all valid CSS1 style sheets are valid CSS2 style sheets

allows information to be presented differently according to the target media (screen, printer, handheld/mobile etc.) and to the client’s settings (alternative layouts, text browsers, etc.)

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CSS2 - Further reading

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

Validation service: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/