Andrew Maben wrote:
I'm finding myself having to justify my work methods to a boss who has
almost zero interest in usability, accessibility or standards. (Though I
have managed to get into the long-term plan: "...website that is
compliant with W3C standards and Section 508...")
One question that has been raised is "if site X has pages that validate
as transitional, why do you have to produce pages that validate as strict?"
Personally, I find that it's actually no more difficult to validate to
strict, so my answer would be along those lines...but obviously don't
know your particular situation (e.g. lots of decentralised content
authors, a heterogeneous team of authors with different skills, a
hideous CMS WYSIWYG tool that outputs all sorts of rubbish, etc)
"Pages that validate as strict are superior to transitional because
_______________."
There's not really a clear-cut answer. Again, speaking personally, I
find that using strict helps in my quality assurance of other authors'
work, because strict removed most of the presentational
elements/attributes, whose presence often points to the likelihood of
inaccessible content. By running third-party pages through strict
validation, I can instantly see if they stuck in font elements or the like.
That is not to mean that it's not possible to make royally inaccessible
pages in strict, mind...it just helps quickly identifying common old
sources of problems from the HTML 4 days...
"It is important to serve pages that validate as strict because
_______________."
Serving them as strict is irrelevant, in my mind. You could in fact
still have transitional pages, just run them through the validator set
to strict for the reason above.
IMHO, of course.
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
______________________________________________________________
Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
______________________________________________________________
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