Most of which are caused by the use of XHTML style tags within a HTML 4.0 doctype, along with that age old favourite, not encoding the &'s (oh the bain of my life that one!)
I suspect whacking an XHTML doctype on would solve a lot of the additional errors that are thrown up - the W3C validator does seem to get a little confused by the former. I started at the BBC as a client side developer doing HTML and JavaScript (starting in 2000), and I do know that the people who build the BBC website are passionate about doing a good job - about accessibility, about validation. It used to annoy me no end that certain coding practises I had to at the time in order to make the designs work [1]. However the BBC website is a large thing with many people and many systems involved. Changing practises on it will take time :( Not an excuse, just an explanation. For contrast it might be worth looking at this checked BBC News page from February 2000. http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org %2Fweb%2F20000229064106%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F Yes there's less errors, but <sucks through teeth> the types of errors found... Tut tut tut! Alt tags missing all over the place... So things have got better in some ways... [1] I spotted this old chesnut in the BBC News website - <table> <form> <tr><td><input type="text"></td></tr> </form> </table> a horrible hack which predates mainstream CSS usage and which allowed us to place a form in a page and not have a 1 line margin underneath it. Obviously you can use CSS now, so I suspect it's a piece of code that has just been kept in through successive recodes... > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Jonathan Chetwynd > Sent: 01 November 2006 18:31 > To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk > Subject: [backstage] checks & balances: validating the BBC > > checks & balances: validating the BBC > > http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://news.bbc.co.uk > 97 errors which is about par > > makes it difficult to consider or discuss the accessibility > of BBC web1.0 product. > suffice it to say they have a process all there own, which > awaits an independent accessibility audit report, afaik. > there have been some published reports that discuss small > parts of the rather large whole.... > > It will require some hard talking to ensure that web2.0 > product is an improvement in accessibility. > > The media player wasn't smil compliant last time they asked > for reviews, whereas realplayer makes an attempt... > > cheers > > Jonathan Chetwynd > > > > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To > unsubscribe, please visit > http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
