What about W3C validation especially for business.gov.au 60 HTML errors, meta tags, alt tags?
I haven't worked on the business.vic.gov.au site since early 2006, but at the time it had almost perfect validation. There were some errors still remaining in various pockets of content transferred to the new CMS, but in general it was pretty good and certainly the home page and major section pages validated - and they were still working on it. After all, validation is a requirement for AA and they were determined to reach that I was dismayed to look at the site yesterday and realise that someone had replaced all the HTML META elements with XHTML ones, creating a large number of errors for each page. It is a simple error, but it is one that indicates that whoever is currently working on the site is probably not very informed about HTML (or was just very rushed and assumed it was in XHTML!) These things happen, Tim. It is the nature of the business. Websites are transitory beasts, by design I just completed a brief review of a small sample of AIMIA winners for
W3C validation, the few I tested did not validate!
I can't speak to the others, but it doesn't surprise me. As I said previously, validation was in no way a requirement for the AIMIA awards
The McFarlane awards had better standards and expert judges. AIMIA sites are better than the AGIMO .gov award winners!
I agree entirely. A lot of it comes down to the guidelines of the award scheme and the varying expertise of the judges involved. The McFarlane prize had very specific guidelines that focused on standards and what most people on this list probably consider to be 'best practice'. They also chose their judges very carefully to be experts in their field AIMIA has many many more sites to judge (from appearances, I have no actual figures) and thus uses many many more judges. Without rigid judging criteria, that is going to lead to varied results depending on varied expertise of the judges. Some judges would obviously have a standards focus, but many would not. Even amongst those who are standards focused, expertise in varying areas is going to differ. I'd certainly be happy to assess sites based on their code whether it is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML. I could evaluate their validation, semantics, accessibility, elegance etc. But I would do less well (probably, much less well) at evaluating a site in terms of specific usability, or design. Those aren't my areas and I wouldn't judge them well I'd suggest that the judges of the AIMIA awards would have similar difficulties with some areas depending on their own particular expertise. None of us are experts at everything Lachlan Hardy ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
