[ILUG] Worst Irish website competition

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 09:05:13PM +0000, Chris Higgins wrote:
> Shouldn't this be secondary to 'standards compliant' ( for whatever
> doctype standard the site claims to support ) and then if a site is
> not standards compliant - how broken is it ( IE4 specific HTML mixed
> with Netscape 4 specific html on same page )

www.google.ie has 32 validation errors according to the w3c validator,
but it looks good in any browser I've seen, and is pretty accessible.
So it's hard to be so strict about these things.

> > * links/lynx compat: It'd be nice if the site was usable through the
> > venerable text browsers.
> 
> There is a general web accessibility initiative (
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/ ) as well as projects such as bobby (
> http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp ) which may be
> better than just links/lynx

Don't always believe the logos either! Rehab.ie, a site by a
disabilities group no less, carries the "Bobby Approved" logo, and it
does meet the bare minimum technical validation checks for the single-A
standard - but it's not in the spirit of it. Many of the alt attributes
are set to things like "space image" and "1pix_div". Take a look at it
in lynx and you'll get an idea how a speech-browser will see it. Not
that this is especially bad or anything, rehab.ie is actually stunningly
above average for accessibility. 

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net