Standards Compliance
We strongly believe in the use of recognised standards. The Web achieved massive growth and success through the open publication of, and adherence to, a set of standards.
The W3C, in particular, produce and evolve an ever-increasing set of standards to sustain and improve this growth of technology. Our belief in these standards is exemplified by this site, which adheres to (or uses) the following (mainly W3C) recognised standards:
- XML
- XSL (XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO)
- XHTML (Strict)
- CSS
- RDF
- P3P
- PICS (ICRA)
- WAI
- Dublin Core Metadata
Through the use of these standards, we are creating a site that:
- is faster, more useful, and more accessible for our visitors.
- is easier to maintain for our site editors.
- produces easily digestible/understandable code for external web agents (e.g. search engine spiders).
Standards FAQ
If this site is so accessible, where's the low-graphics version?
Accessibility is often misunderstood. Firstly, accessibility is about 'providing access to all' - whether the user is colour blind, from a different culture, a different country, or of a different technical ability. Accessibility therefore covers a much broader scope than 'disabled access', and includes wording of content, formatting of dates, etc.
With regards to low-graphics versions, XHTML and CSS negate the need for them. By using (X)HTML 'correctly' - i.e. marking up menus as lists, headings as headings, and separating presentational 'style' into CSS, the functionality of browsers can be used to adapt the look of the site to that which the visitor requires. There is no longer a need to segregate users; placing one group into a 'lesser' version.
What does P3P do for me?
Through the implementation of P3P on the Box UK site, we are explicitly stating our privacy policy in a format that your web browser can understand. By specifying the type of privacy you require in your browser, you can therefore be automatically warned if this site (or any other) follows any practices which you disagree with.
Using XHTML is great, but why bother - it looks the same as HTML to me?
Accessibility is a key issue, as stated earlier. However, by using an XML compatible format, we are also producing content which can be easily re-structured and digested by other software on the web.
XHTML is also the recommended format by the W3C. The HTML 4 standard (which is incorporated into XHTML) is therefore now outdated; any improvements in mark-up on the web will be integrated more thoroughly into XHTML, e.g. SVG, MathML or XForms.
What other standards will you be integrating into the site?
As with other Internet agencies, we can't dedicate all our time to improving our own site! However, with advances in the software that we produce, to benefit our clients projects, we will hopefully be integrating SVG, OWL, and other ground breaking technologies.
