Copenhagen, 6 June 2006 Modern Web standards in CHM portals Mădălina Sauca Finsiel Romania

2 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

3 Accessibility - Further reading    Full WAI standards description for all the three levels of conformance:   ist (check list) ist

4 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)

5 Usability - Further reading  

6 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, tags for headings, use of only for tabular information and NOT for the layout design... etc.

7 Semantic HTML - Further reading  events/archives/presentations/semantichtml.html events/archives/presentations/semantichtml.html 

8 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 on  either the HTML Document Object Model  or the XML Document Object Model

9 XHTML - Further reading   Validation service 

10 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.)

11 CSS2 - Further reading     Validation service: 