Al-Ahram weekly online review.
I have just reviewed Al-Ahram weekly web site it is a great approach to web standards in Egypt, but you are not there yet there is still some issues with your site. Review result:
- According to the W3C validator site pages are not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! It had 36 errors.
- Using XHTML is better than HTML (discussed later).
- It is layouted by tables which is not recommended (discussed later) instead of it you can use pure CSS layout.
- According to the W3C validator CSS is not Valid.
- It does not meet Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines & section 508 guidelines. WAI has three priorities of Accessibility it must at least meets the first priority guidelines and section 508 guidelines.
- It has some defects according to watchfire validator including 5 broken links & elements missing Alternate text. Elements missing height and width attribute.
Experience:
- Wired news had made the switch. Read their full experience here.
Suggestion :
- I suggest adding text-sizing icons that users can use to change text size. To see an example of it check wired news.
- A link from the page header to the RSS feed would be great. So that it be known to browsers like firefox and safari that there is RSS feed in this page so you can click on the icon and subscribe in the RSS feed.What I mean by a link is a link in the code itself like this in the of the page.
Review discussion.
2- Why use XHTML rather than HTML ?
By authoring web pages now using XHTML, we're taking steps to ensure these pages will work with future browsers & devices. XHTML is also designed to be readable by the highest number of browsers, devices and software. Markup that is written in XHTML stands a better chance of being properly understood no matter what is reading it.
3- Why tables and spacers and break lines is not recommended.
- Because it adds a lot of unneeded code on every page while it could be included in the one CSS file that all the pages link to it. Imagine for example that we have 200 pages how much code will be simplified if we apply this technique. And also how much bandwidth will be saved.
- Using tables reduce your site search engine rankings.
