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Meeting Standards
Have you ever read sites regarding internet standards? I have no doubt that a lot of people have a grasp, an idea and the ability to use a validator. But I’m on about being a bit more involved.
I started last weekend working on a document to layout the standards I wish I could conform to at all times. Doing it I came across a lot of information I hadn’t thought about before. Simple things, like usability; I’ve always tried to maintain graceful downgrading of page’s and cater for as many browsers as possible. Now looking into it I wonder.- Have I really made a page accessible?
- Did I make the images small as possible whilst maintaining quality?
- Did I carefully give relevant item’s alt and title tags?
- Did I take into account if images failed to load at all?
The answer is… sometimes. Often though i overlook how a page will look to some people; the feel instead of if its accessibility. Items are made available to the developer to ensure the page is as rich as possible, acronym tags, title, alt and rel tags to define the layout. Sure, a page without them will validate, but wouldn’t it be nice if covered these? Hovering over acronyms giving explanations for someone who doesn’t recognize it, saving them a google search; giving links a descriptive meaning without making the link text stupidly long and there are other examples I’m obvious omitting. Then we get to images; I’ve always sized my image up in an editing program, slammed it into a document, applied styles to the content around it and forgot about it. I’ve realized i rarely take care of how that page looks if the image fails to load. Do many people? What is the best practice here? Apply styles that keep a space and show a description of the image instead? Things i still need to figure out.
So, back to the document. It’s not live (yet) and it’s not a “i think everyone should do X” document, but it’s a personal standard for me to work by that just happened to make me wonder what other people set their standards to, if to anything at all? Do many web developers take the validator as all defining power over the web?
blabbering: finished
