patspam wrote:

Actually, looks like Diona beat me to the punch!

Patrick

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 3:40 PM, <pat@patspam.com> wrote:

patspam wrote:

Hi fellow template fixers,

Today was the first day that I had some time to do some template fixing-related research.

The first thing I wanted to do was learn more about the standards requirements imposed by the Dutch Government on government website projects. It turns out that this initiative is quite well known and internationally recognised as "The Web Guidelines quality model". In fact my own state government here in Australia links directly to the English version of the webrichtlijnen.nl website from their Web Services Policies and Standards information page.

The Web Guidelines quality model website is an absolute gold-mine of information on requirements, guidelines, standards, rationale & philosophy on why different choices were made, etc.. all numbered for easy reference and presented in a clean and accessible fashion. I have no doubt it will be an invaluable resource to us in our efforts to improve WebGUI's templates.

• The Dutch version is located at: http://www.webrichtlijnen.nl
• The English version is located at: http://www.webrichtlijnen.nl/english
  

There are also useful discussions of the announcement of the initiative on the webstandards.org and quirksmode.org websites, including comments by Raph de Rooij who apparently was involved in the development of the requirements.

The first thing that jumped out at me is that either HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 can be used. This will not doubt be a big relief to anyone who has worked with the current crop of Ajax Toolkits (such as YUI which WebGUI uses), as HTML 4.01 Strict is almost universally singled out as the recommend !DOCTYPE to trigger Standards Mode in browsers with multiple rendering modes (ref1, ref2, ref3, ...).

Here's an except from the Web Guidelines quality model:

R-pd.2.1	Use HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 according to the W3C specifications for the markup of websites.
R-pd.2.2	Do not use any markup which is referred to as deprecated (outmoded) in the W3C specifications.
R-pd.2.3	When modifying an existing website: only use the Transitional version of HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 if it is not possible or desirable to use the Strict version.
R-pd.2.4	When building a new website: only use the Strict version of HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0.

The Web Guidelines quality model also has an online tool for testing 47 of the 125 recommendations which is very cool. You can view the results of running the test on webgui.org here (it gets a score of 31/47).

I'm sure there's lots of other great resources in the website yet to be discovered too.

Regards,

Patrick

http://www.plainblack.com/forums/webgui-templates-working-group/the-web-guidelines-quality-model

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rogier wrote:

Well Pat, you beat ME to it! The Dutch guidelines are both more detailed and stricter than section 508. I think it would be interesting to check how many of the section 508 requirements are covered by the Dutch guidelines.

Rogier | United Knowledge
www.unitedknowledge.nl · www.webgui-help.nl

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arjan wrote:

In about 70% of our work we have to comply with The Web Guidelines. We've had contact with Raph de Rooij in some of them. There's a working group around a new project that has a lot to do with these guidelines. The Dutch govenment has a new logo for all of the central government and between now and 2012 all sites of the central government will have to comply with a new set of web templates. That are in development now. Meanwhile we are building the first website in this new style for the ministry of Interior Affairs and I'm asked to take part in this working group.

This means two things. First and foremost that I would be very happy man if WebGUI would by default be Web Guidelines compliant, because in most projects it's a large part of our work to make it Web Guidelines compliant. Another is that the people behind these guidelines are accessible. And of course this also means that WebGUI will be the first CMS that will have a compliant website in this new style. Although it wasn't always easy to comply.

Kind regards,

Arjan Widlak

United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector

www.unitedknowledge.nl

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