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Home / Writing / Web Development / Web Standards /

Introduction

The technologies considered for development of web sites include HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, PHP and Macromedia Flash.
Other considerations discussed within this document include the directory structure and file naming conventions.

Implicit in all of these standrads is teh expectation that all web sites will be accessible to people with disabilities as defined by the W3 Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative

Target Delivery System

The decisions about system requirements for the site are based on data from http://www.browserwatch.com/.
Browserwatch is a development site that tracks browser type, version, and operating system.

Supported Browsers
As of September 2, 2001, Browserwatch reports 62.6% of surfers visited its web site with Internet Explorer and 21.7% of surfers with Netscape Navigator. With this data, the development team concludes Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator comprise 84.3% of web browsers. The site will be designed to work without errors on Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator version 4.0 and higher.

Supported Platforms
As of July 2001, The W3School reported the Windows operating system accounting for 94% of web users. The Macintosh operating system accounted for 1% of web users, and other type of operating systems (i.e. UNIX & LINUX) accounted for 5%. (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp )The Creations' web site will be designed to work on the following operating systems: Wintel Machines running the Windows Operating System Macintosh machine with the Macintosh Operating System

Target Screen Resolution
As of July 2001, The W3School reported 38% of web users with screen resolutions of 1024x768 or higher, 53% of web users with screen resolutions of 800x600, and 4% of web users with screen resolutions of 640x480. This data indicates that 91% of web users have screen resolutions of 800x600 or higher. (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp )The Creations' web site will be designed for resolutions of 800x600 or higher.

Other Technical Considerations
As of July 2001, The W3School reported that 88% of web users used Javascript enabled browsers. The W3School also reported 11% of web users turn off Javascript.The Creations' site will use Javascript because of the added functionality and large percentage of web users with Javascript enabled browsers. (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)In addition, the site will be designed to work on browsers that support images and Cascading style sheets.

Server Information
The site will be hosted on a UNIX server with (##) megabytes of disk space. The server will have the capability to run CGI scripts and will support PHP implementation.

HTML 4.0

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, will be the primary development and integration tool for the site.
The development team will use HTML 4.0 which has been approved by the World Wide Web Consortium. More information about HTML 4.0 or the World Wide Web Consortium, or WC3, can be located at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.
The alt attribute will describe the contents of all relevant images on the site.
In order to facilitate indexing of the site by search engines, metatags (keyword and description) will be used on the home page. The Creations' site will use keywords such as 'Fine Dining', 'The Art Institute of Atlanta', 'Atlanta', 'French Cuisine', and 'Business Lunch' to describe the Creations' site.
The use of percent values with the width attribute of the table tag as well as the table row and data cell tags will allow flexibility of resizing the browser window without losing the information on the screen. Sites will be designed to be resized to 75% of the maximum screen size.

The following HTML tags WILL NOT BE USED:

If the <div> or <span> tags are used, they will use the 'class' attribute to specify a style sheet entry for alignment attributes.
Tag attributes such as 'color', 'bgcolor', etc., should be avoided in preference to style sheets.


Cascading Style Sheets

External, linked, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will be used for specifying display features of text content and layout on sites. Despite the realty that CSS have been notoriously incompatible across browsers, only a small minority of browsers will show an 'ugly' page. The content will still be available. At the same time, CSS offer the developers significant control over display features of the web site. In view of this, only CSS that can be fairliy well supported across browsers will be used on the site.


JavaScript

JavaScript will add required client-side functionality to the site. Internet Explorer 4.0, Netscape Navigator 4.0 and higher version browsers support JavaScript. Since it is possible to disable JavaScript from the above browsers, alternative 'noscript' tags will be included to insure continued functionality. All pages will be tested on a browser with JavaScript disabled.


Image Formats

The 'jpg' file format will be used for photographic images. Flat art or illustrations will be displayed in the 'gif' file format.
For most applications, images requiring more than 255 colors will use '.jpg' format while images using less than 255 (icons, buttons, etc.) will use the '.gif' format.

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP, will be used in the Reservations section. This server-side code is needed to collect data from the reservation form and submit the data via email to the specified address.

http://php.net


File Naming Conventions

The file naming convention will use enough characters to insure that the content of the file is apparent. Filenames will contain only alpha-numeric characters (a-z 0-9), a hyphen, or underline characters.


Meaningful Links

Hyperlinks should make sense - even if read out of context. Screen reader programs allow the user to tab through the page quickly, stopping only on the links. The screen read will read the text of the hyperlink, allowing the blind visitor to quickly select the desired link.

Read what the W3 consortium has to say about "click here" links


Directory Structure

The directory structure for all sites will mirror the navigation system. For example, if the main menu is divided into four sections labeled:
‘About Us’, ‘Project’, ‘Events’, ‘Resources’
A directory (folder) will be created for each section:
'about_us', 'project', 'events', 'resources'

The directory structure will be based on the navigation system so that the webmaster can use the navigation bar and flowchart of the site to determine where the files are located on the server. In addition, URL addresses will inheriently contain additional data about the contents of the page.


Information on this page is based upon a document copyrighted by Sydney Aron ( http://sydneyaron.com/ )