ITnews Site Colophon

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Web Standards
ITnews complies fully with the published W3C standards for mark-up, formatting and accessibility. Find out more...

ITnews has undergone a massive redesign effort to bring you the new look and feel and functionality you see before you. The development team completed this redesign in an effort to show how advanced XML and CSS can be used to develop sites that display in all modern mainstream browsers, using standards-based layout and design techniques, as well as fully supporting accessibility and allowing for user control of the interface.

The Challenge

In re-designing and building the ITnews web site our major considerations were to:

generate code in XHTML to ensure forward compatibility;
format all text using CSS to allow for user customisation and rapid redeisgn;
ensure that all mark-up (XHTML) and styling (CSS) complied with web programming standards and that all pages could be verified against W3C's validation services;
ensure that the entire site was wholly accessible and that all pages complied with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Triple A rating;
allow for all pages to be printed correctly as part of the native browser functionality and without the addition of 'printer-friendly' pages;
illustrate that design need not be compromised as a result of programimg to web standards and making sites fully accessible.

We achieved all the above goals and remained fully compliant with all accessibility laws.

Methodologies

Each page on the site is programmed in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and validated against W3C. All styling was achieved through CSS Level 2, again validated using the W3C service. This means that the site guarantees forward compatibility in browsers that support web standards. But the site may not display as it should in earlier, non-compliant versions of browsers. If you are using Internet Explorer 3.x, for example, the site will not display as it was designed.

But our view on this is a simple one: Our code is compliant with the published standards, whilst early browsers are not. We do not feel that creating legacy problems for tomorrow to be justification for programming poor code merely to satisfy poor browsers. Those that insist on using non-standard browsers must expect a non-standard user experience! But enough of the soapbox.

Although the browser wars are over, there are still differences in the quality with which mainstream browsers handle the web standards. But we insisted that our code would not 'version' for different browsers – the same code is served up, no matter what client is in use. To accommodate these differences we used a hybrid wire frame for the page layout. The banner and the three columns are produced using tables (nothing particularly wrong with that). But CSS is used to format all text and objects on the page, including menus.

Tools

For those that are interested, here is a brief summary of the tools and server environment we used to redevelop the site.

We used Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 for code generation and site management. The various layouts are achieved through the application of master and nested templates. Features common to some pages are achieved through library code files. Dreamweaver also handled all site management requirements, including link integrity, and testing and deployment server publishing.

CSS style sheets were created using TopStyle Pro 3.0, from Bradbury, which fully integrates with Dreamweaver as the preferred style sheet editor. (TopStyle was developed by the original developers of HomeSite.) TopStyle managed the different style sheets for the various site themes, as well as for dedicated print style sheet support. TopStyle was also used as a manual XHTML editor on an occasional basis.

As an ongoing part of the programming effort, each page is routinely checked for accessibility compliance using Bobby 5.0, from Watchfire Corporation. Bobby was configured to measure each page against WCAG's Priority 3 (Triple A) standard. Bobby makes more than 90 measurements against the WCAG checkpoints. Prior to publication, each page on the site is Bobby approved.

Finally, ITnews is deployed on a Macromedia Coldfusion MX 6.1, running on Unix. Coldfusion was chosen for its ease of deployment, extended functionality, custom server behaviours and custom tags. Using Coldfusion also allows for rapid redevelopment or migration of certain features to different coding languages.