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From: John Foliot - WATS.ca
Date: Sat, Mar 25 2006 4:40AM
Subject: Site Warnings (was RE: FW: HTML - <abbr> and <acronym>settings)
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Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> I've often pondered what it would be like if widely used browsers such
> as IE had a (subtle, but still quite visible) warning sign for tag
> soup sites (similar to the warning triangle you get for javascript
> errors, but a bit more visible and obvious). I could imagine
> discussions between web developers and their bosses (head of
> marketing or similar) along the lines of "why does our site bring up
> that warning, while our competitor's site doesn't?" (this obviously
> focussed on developers who don't care about standards and work in a
> corporate environment).
>

While I would be the first to warn that code validation alone does not
make for an accessible web site, my general impression is that if a site
meets at least this (Priority 2) requirement, chances are other, more
subtle nuances of web accessibility have been, at the very least,
considered.

To that end, my #1 favorite Mozilla Extension is HTML Validator, a
Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla.
(http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/). It places a small icon in
the bottom right corner of the browser chrome and indicates whether a
site is valid (per Tidy) or not. It also extends added functionality to
the "view source", showing line and character position of the invalid
code, and highlighting the offending bits with a background color -
making repair a breeze.

When a site "arrives" with the little green checkmark, I smile; when it
shows warnings I shrug, and when it shows errors I mutter, "figures...".

Patrick, I would venture to guess that this would help achieve the
"shame-factor" you are talking about...

JF
--
John Foliot = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Web Accessibility Specialist
WATS.ca - Web Accessibility Testing and Services
http://www.wats.ca
Phone: 1-613-482-7053