Opera Campus Crew Blog

I remember that my old school's website was atrocious. It was slow, required loads of JavaScript and stood out through a lack of relevant content. (I just checked, it still does.) And the same was true about my current university but just before I got here, their website was completely rebuilt with web standards in mind —they must have seen me coming! However, I still found a few glitches on their site, nothing major though. On the main site, there were some ampersands (that's "&") in URLs that weren't properly escaped and the library's news section was technically outdated. (If you find a few terms that don't mean anything to you, don't worry,) Also, the library's Journal search used a JavaScript (presumably to verify user input) that made it difficult to create custom searches in Opera. I wrote an e-mail to our IT-department and they addressed all of these issues very quickly — woohoo!

But now I want to write about the whole thing in more general, so that you might be able to make your uni/school's website standards compliant...

Background

Often websites are "optimized" for Internet Explorer. "Optimized" here is more of an euphemism, because due to its poor standards compliance, "optimizing" for Microsoft's Internet Explorer often leads to a website that is inaccessible for other browsers. However, such websites are often not only poorly accessible with other browsers, but also screen readers, crawlers (such as the Google bot) and often take longer to load. That's why in many countries legislation has been passed to ensure that official websites have to fulfill certain minimal criteria in order to ensure accessibility. Although web standards compliance and accessibility are different things, they often go hand in hand and generalizing it can be said that standards compliance is necessary for accessibility. But I don't want to go into too much detail, as these arguments have made that before, much better than I could. Check out the Web Standards Curriculum at Opera Developers!

Check...

So where to start? Checking your university/school's website is not that difficult, even if your knowledge of HTML and websites is very basic. The most important thing to know is the HTML-validator by the W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium is the organization that develops and standardizes HTML and related standards, such as xHTML and CSS and they also have a CSS-Validator. Their validator will tell all you need. As an Opera user, it's even easier to check a website's standard compliance: Simply right click on the site and then choose Validate and Opera will upload the site to the validator - that's all! Try it: Validate Opera's website and Microsoft's website. And you will see the difference! At the time of writing Opera's website has 0 errors and 0 warnings and validates. However, Microsoft's front page has 117 errors and 37 warnings. Surprise... Read more about it in the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. But when validating your institution's website, don't restrict yourself on validating the front page, check other sites as well. As mentioned, the main site of my university validated, but parts the library's news section did not.

Act...

Once you have identified errors, it's probably the best to contact you university's IT section and tell them what you have found. They should know what to do, if not you can point them to Opera's Web Standards Curriculum. However, if you are at a school, it is well possible that admins have too much to do and they are willing to let you help out. But often they are reluctant to do so, which is quite understandable: in the end the website will be their responsibility. But if you let your social skills play and write friendly emails and reply to theirs, they might take your arguments into account, probably not immediately, but maybe later, when the website gets a major overhaul anyways.

But even if you get your website all standards-conformed you have to test it in all relevant browsers. This includes Firefox, Safari/Konqueror and, obviously Opera. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (soon 8, too) have to be tested, too. Whilst the future IE8 will be almost as trouble-free as Opera, Firefox and Safari, particularly IE 6 poses a major challenge to web development. It all depends on the technology you used, but personally I recommend conditional style comments to avoid the worst deviations. They are relatively hassle free as all normal browsers will ignore them. But bear in mind that websites are not static and will look slightly different on different browsers and screens.

The cream on your coffee...

If you have plenty of time and are really interested in the topic, read about accessibility and check your website on mobile browsers. Again, using Opera comes in handy as the desktop browser allows you to display websites in a mobile mode. Click on View and choose Small Screen.

In the end...

Whilst standards compatibility is important, it is not enough. As mentioned, accessibility is another, albeit more complicated issue. Again, there are many guides on that on the net, too. (Did I mention Opera's Web Standards guide?!) And whilst you are at it, if your institution's website is technically perfect, you might want to consider helping out with the content, too. Because even the best layout and perfect accessibility are worth nothing if the content is bad or is simply missing.

My final words...really!

I hope that didn't sound all too complicated. If so, let me know... Also, feel free to ask any questions and share your experiences. Good luck!