#34000
What Are Web Standards and Why Should I Use Them?
Standards have so much to offer that we at The Web Standards Project (WaSP) consider it necessary to help you learn more about them. This document is merely a starting point; it will give you a solid understanding of what standards exist, why they do, and why you should care about them. Every time we create a piece of the Web, we contribute to the common information space that is the Web. We can build it up, or we can add weight that will tear it apart. The choice belongs to us; the consequences belong to everyone.
Web Standards Project (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Education
#34005
Browser Problems with the XML Prolog
Some browsers have difficulty upon encountering the XML Prolog. In some cases, the browser will render all the markup as text. In other cases, when a browser has some XML support, it might attempt to render the document as an XML tree. To avoid these problems, many practicing web professionals prefer to leave the prolog off. This table will help you make that decision by showing you which browsers have known problems with the XML prolog.
Web Standards Project (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XML
#34137
When people talk about video formats, they're referring to something called a container format. The container format is a detailed description of what's inside a video file. It describes the structure of the file, as well as the kind of data that the file contains.
Geeks.com (2009). Articles>Multimedia>Video>Standards
#34149
The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types
Here's a dirty little secret: browsers aren't actually treating your XHTML as XML. Your validated, correctly DOCTYPE'd, completely standards compliant XHTML markup is being treated as if it were still HTML with a few weird slashes in places they don't belong (like
and ). Why? The answer is MIME types.
Pilgrim, Mark. XML.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>XHTML>Standards
#34216
When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do
Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have shown renewed commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the last few years -- and they're following through. Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one, small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web.
Mitchell, Robert L. Computerworld (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers
#34268
Fifteen Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS
But as silly as it may seem, some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what some of those errors are and remembering to look for them can save you hours of wasted labor. Here are fifteen ways I’ve found to break my CSS for sure — and fifteen things I always look for whenever I have a problem in my code.
Glazebrook, Rob L. CSS Newbie (2009). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#34429
Content, Standards, Learning and SCORM
Within content domains, the key themes of the information age are being adopted: Modularisation, specialisation, integration and interoperability. Our communication is changing in volume, purpose and channels. The emphasis is more on collaboration and less on expert-to-novice teaching. And there’s a stronger emphasis on openness.
Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Education>Online>Standards
#34616
New Accessibility Guidelines A "Welcomed Update"
The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" is now the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. This new WCAG 2.0 document, a welcomed update, replaces the WCAG 1.0 W3C recommendation of 1999. This article is part one in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 2.0 on your website.
Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#34619
New Accessibility Guidelines Part IV: Robustness
The fourth principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requires new web documents to be “robust.” Robustness, future-proofing, user-agent independence, accessibility-supported: All are terms that suggest the same basic idea that your documents should follow standard, supported models for web document types. In many ways, this is the simplest and most testable requirement of the WCAG, but the details can be quite complicated.
Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#34642
It is six months since the release of WCAG 2.0 and I thought it might be interesting to see how extensively it has been adopted as a bench mark for determining web content accessibility. Over this time, I have felt that the rate of adoption has been relatively slow and the number of countries and other regulatory authorities now using WCAG 2 is lower than I expected.
Hudson, Roger. DingoAccess (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#34643
This standard is directed toward ensuring equitable access to all content on Government of Canada Web sites.
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (2007). Resources>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#34672
html5doctor is a collaboration between, Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp and Tom Leadbetter. The site came about following a HTML5 meetup after the Future of Web Design conference in London (2009). We decided that there wasn’t a resource that catered for the people who wished to find out more about implementing HTML5 and how to go about it, so we thought we’d better build one. We will publish articles relating to HTML5 and it’s semantics and how to use them, here and now.
#34674
HTML 5 offers a new element to mark additional information that can enhance an article but isn’t necessarily key to understanding it. However, in the interpretation of 'aside' there lies confusion as to how it can be used, and with that there is demand for the Doctor to step up and clear the air. In this article I will look at what 'aside' was created for, including sample uses and how not to use this useful, misunderstood element.
HTML 5 Doctor (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
#34688
Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!
The blogosphere was jerked into excitement when Google gave a sneak preview of its new service, Google Wave. Only the select few have an account, but there’s an 80-minute video about it on YouTube for the rest of us. The service is an HTML 5 app, and so HTML 5 has gone from being too far away to care about to today’s hot topic.
Lawson, Bruce. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
#34689
Here at SitePoint, we have started thinking about HTML 5, and whether or not the time is right to publish a book about it. To help us decide, we asked a number of web luminaries what they thought. Their answers were both varied and interesting. Take a look and decide for yourself: is it time you started learning about HTML 5?
Yank, Kevin. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
#34737
Recommended List of DTDs You Can Use in Your Web Document
When authoring document is HTML or XHTML, it is important to Add a Doctype declaration. The declaration must be exact (both in spelling and in case) to have the desired effect, which makes it sometimes difficult. To ease the work, below is a list of recommended declarations that you can use in your Web documents.
W3C (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
#34762
This XHTML cheat sheet is excellent for XHTML coders. Along with many basic attributes, this two-page grid includes references that even experienced web professionals would find useful. Three types of elements are defined in this cheat sheet: block, inline and table elements. The miscellaneous section includes 22 additional elements. Each row contains the name, description and attributes of each of the elements available for use.
Flyspray (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
#34763
This cheat sheet is designed to not only be a quick reference for CSS properties but also to give you a good feel for how each property should be used. It contains all of the properties in the CSS2 specification including a description of the syntax of each one.
Coding Fool, A (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#34783
Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group Wiki
The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as: fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer, and curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.
#34789
#34791
Defining Quality for Documentation Practices
Defining quality means developing expectations or standards of quality. Standards can be developed for inputs, processes, or outcomes; they can be clinical or administrative. Unfortunately when it comes to documentation, many companies only focus on the standards related to time and accuracy. Quality standards should be in place for all aspect of the documentation development pathway—moving from planning, to authoring, to reviewing.
Cuppan, Gregory. Brainery.net (2009). Resources>Business Communication>Documentation>Standards
#34806
Markers That Help Measure Communication Quality
In our consultancy, we have developed a set of terms that represent what we consider to be an effective set of descriptive markers. Markers that help to measure how well a document is communicating. We characterize our set of markers as “Document Standards” for all forms of technical and scientific writing.
Cuppan, Gregory P. Brainery.net (2009). Articles>Documentation>Quality>Standards
#34807
How Do You Measure Communication Quality?
Most people involved with authoring and reviewing process do not have good markers to inform them of the overall communication quality of a document. So without good markers they are left to utilize really poor markers to help them measure document quality.
Cuppan, Gregory P. Brainery.net (2009). Articles>Documentation>Quality>Standards
#34873
International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used 
Despite the authoritative nature of international standards for usability, many of them are not widely used. This paper explains both the benefits and some of the potential problems in using usability standards in areas including user interface design, usability assurance, software quality, and usability process improvement.
Bevan, Nigel. Journal of Usability Studies (2009). Articles>Usability>Standards>International
#34874
Determining What Individual SUS Scores Mean: Adding an Adjective Rating Scale
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is an inexpensive, yet effective tool for assessing the usability of a product, including Web sites, cell phones, interactive voice response systems, TV applications, and more. It provides an easy-to-understand score from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive). While a 100-point scale is intuitive in many respects and allows for relative judgments, information describing how the numeric score translates into an absolute judgment of usability is not known. To help answer that question, a seven-point adjective-anchored Likert scale was added as an eleventh question to nearly 1,000 SUS surveys. Results show that the Likert scale scores correlate extremely well with the SUS scores (r=0.822). The addition of the adjective rating scale to the SUS may help practitioners interpret individual SUS scores and aid in explaining the results to non-human factors professionals.
Bangor, Aaron, Philip Kortum and James Miller. Journal of Usability Studies (2009). Articles>Usability>Assessment>Standards
