Re: [WSG] New Zealand Web Standards??

[Matthew Cruickshank]

Darren Wood wrote: I get _very_ depressed when i see high profile[1] new zealand sites completely drop the ball[2]... A few months back (maybe even a year) the NZ government released web guidelines for all their websites.[3] I think it's about 2 years old now. I was on the working group in 2002 to review them and I got CSS 2 in, and the W3C DOM rather than proprietary. In comparison to most overseas guidelines I like that the nz guidelines are short and that it's broken into audiences. Techies can read chapter 6 to get the gist of it. I think XHTML should have been allowed -- the reasoning at the time (as I understand it) was that there's no difference to the users between HTML 4.01 and XHTML, that XSL can output either, so it's a pointless choice. At the time I agreed that there was no real difference, but I think the reason why it should be allowed is because when software chooses a web standard they'll tend to choose XHTML 1.0, not HTML 4.01. The timeline for most government agencies is, "all new or revised content produced for existing non-Guideline compliant websites after 1 April 2004 should comply with the Guidelines as closely as possible; existing websites should become compliant with Version 2.1 of the Guidelines on the next occasion of a complete website redevelopment occurring before 1 January 2006;" I was the lead dev on http://www.work.govt.nz/ which is compliant. I'm not too happy with the graphic design of http://e.govt.nz, it's 3 years old. I did the html, and the interface is ok I guess. Is there a list of urls that should comply with the guidelines? [1] http://tvnz.co.nz - Inaccessible, slow, Flash, non-standards, table based. The sad bit is that they used a fantastic framework called Apache Cocoon (which I used for worksite.govt.nz) and yet when they released it they had multiple root tags (some of which were divs) and it ended up as tagsoup. The code looks a little better now, but it doesn't look like they're really that into web standards. Anything's better than the old tv2 site though. They're getting better :) .Matthew Cruickshank http://holloway.co.nz/