Standards Compliant Websites

Perseus

Perseus

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A lot of standards compliant websites are geared towards great content, and minimal use of images, etc. Is there any harm in having lots of images [little or no flash] (lets say an art gallery; or using images to make up a special part of the design of the site) but still maintaining standards? Zeldman's site and Eric Meyer's site are great, because they are standards gurus, but a lot of these sites are fancy looking blogs and maybe I dont want to HAVE to do that just to conform to Zeldman's ideal. I'd like to have something that is visually pleasing, yet standards compliant.
 
I would say no problem since in that case the images are the content. The biggest problem with standards compliance is that people just write crappy code with gifs of text and, and, please don't make me go on...

In the case of an art gallery about the only thing you would have to do is make sure that the images had the proper alt tags. Go spend some time hanging out in the CSS Zen Garden to see how you can have totally beautiful visual standards compliant websites.
 
It's absolutely a myth that W3C compliance = boring website. You can create beautiful sites that are still Triple A compliant (certainly A or AA compliance is easy without impacting on the design).

The problem is not using text or javascript or flash or anything else -- it's using those things irresponsibly. So long as your website:


- uses alternative text for all images (if an image is purely decorative, just write alt="" with nothing inside the quotes)
- linearises (if styles are turned off, the page should still appear in a logcial, usable order)
- CSS is used for layout
- Site can be navigated using only the keyboard
- screen readers will read the text (ie: dont use images as text, or java applets for important content which the reader cannot see).
- HTML and CSS validates (use W3C validator)

If you do all of those things your site should be standards compliant and accessible. :D It's good to know there are people like you out there willing to aim for compliance seeing as so many others choose to ignore it.


btw, you can test how your pages will be read out with a screen reader by using VoiceOver, built int OS X Tiger. Command + F5 starts it. To get it to read a page from top to bottom, open it in Safari, press Command + F5, then pres Control + Option + Left arrow. Keep pressing left arrow until the black square surrounds the entire HTML area (VoiceOver will say 'HTML content'). When that happens, press Control + Option + A and it will read the page from top to bottom.
 
Use CSS for decorative images, and XHTML img tags with alt attributes for images which are part of the content.
 
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