Posts tagged validation

Check Your Links~~!!

0
6 years ago
by Vicker in

Browsing around the web and found some old statistics from Search Engine Showdown. It is a short report about the dead links found in the famous search engines. You can have a look at here. Although the report is a few years ago already, it is still quite shocking. On average there is around 5% of dead links!

Dead links are really disgusting sometimes. For example, when you want to find a certain information on the web. After finding a few hours, you hardly got a link. However, it is dead… I am sure it is a disaster.

The presence of dead links have quite a number of reasons behind. e.g. the closure of a certain web, the typing errors, illegal link copying, etc. Are there any method to avoid them? The following are some tips.

1. Use more relative links.

The meaning of relative links are links that referring to the current path instead of the root. e.g. For absolute link, we will have something like “http://www.cityu.edu.hk/image/logo.gif”. For relative, we will simply say “image/logo.gif”, assuming that your document is one level upper than the image folder.

The advantage of relative link is that, even your web is transferred to a different domain, it still works. This is very useful for authors who usually edit the files locally and upload to server after editing.

2. Try not to link to other web’s file, copy them.

We will not know or notice when the other web move the file away or rename it. So if we have web space, try to copy it down and link to the local copies.

3. Using some link validator.

W3C Link Checker
Dead-Links.com
This will make the checking of dead links easier and faster.

Hope we will not see this in the future.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

0
6 years ago
by Vicker in

Before having the first lecture there are already quite a large number of things that can be explored simply browsing Andy’s web.

You may notice that there are a number of small icons on the bottom of Andy’s course web. Saying W3C XHTML, W3C CSS, W3C WCAG, BOBBY 508 and BOBBY AAA.

For the first two, I guess is quite familiar to many people. They are the standards posted by W3C. (World Wide Web Consortium) Using the validators provided by them, (HTML validator and CSS validator) anyone can check whether their web page fullfill the requirements of the standards. If it is a success, they can place this icon on their web.

But how about WCAG, 508 and Bobby??

Due to my curiosity, I have made some search on W3C. Actually WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a guideline which will make a website more accessible. (WCAG 1.0) Section 508 is something similar to WCAG but written in US Federal law.WCAG have a total of 3 accessibility compliance, A, AA and AAA. (where AAA is the best and of course the hardest to achieve) Although W3C do not provide any automated WCAG checker, we can still check it through WebXACT. (WebXACT) I guess the former name is Bobby but now changed. However even WebXACT can not do all the testing inside the guideline, because some of them are not coding related, e.g. color matching.

Although it is hard to acheive all these standards, I think as a web designer we should try our best to do at least most of these. This improves not only the speed of loading the page but also helping our visitors to browse.

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