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Validation vs. users

So why didn't our pages validate before? Well, simple answer, because when the templates around our pages were made we had to provide a (relatively) identical experience to the widest possible audience possible. This meant tables for older browsers, breaking the odd rule or two for browsers that did odd things.

To some people a page not validating is a heinous crime, some of whom will rant that it makes the site less accessible. Well, in some cases that's true, but I'd challenge anyone to find a problem caused by the way we allowed the rules to be broken.

A chink in that argument is the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s position in the industry. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is used by some people in the UK to learn how to build html, at least according to many who come for jobs in my team. We get seen as the right way to do things and so with this responsibility we have to try to 'do the right thing'. As such validation is something we've wanted to do for a while, but selling a technical goal, with benefits that aren't always easy to explain to a media industry, isn't that easy and so they don't always end up far enough up the priority tree to get done. With current changes and new projects in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ this is changing (cross fingers).

So where does this leave us now with old browsers, and all those users we were trying to serve? Well we still deliver them the site, we still deliver them the content is a format that is readable and usable, we just don't deliver them the css layer. Only with the use of semantic mark-up and some creative thinking about user experience has this allowed us to still serve those users**, and meet the goals of the majority users.

Accessibility

So, is the new page more accessible? It certainly is. With semantic mark-up, , , , among a multitude of other efforts to make the page as accessible as possible the page represents much of where the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is going with Accessibility (short of visual design changes to the page, at this time).

Display Settings

Something that seems to have escaped the attention of many as yet is our new 'display settings' option. this replaces the older 'text only' option on the homepage and trials a new way (for us anyway) of meeting the need of users that may have difficulty viewing the page as designed. Some of you will be familiar with user stylesheets, well this is us providing users (hopefully) with a way to alter the appearance of the page, and make it more viewable to them personally, without having to understand how to use the more complicated aspects of their browser or write css themselves. Easiest way to explain this is simply to get you to have a look/play yourselves, so go to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ homepage and on the top left you'll find the link just under the toolbar.

Credits

Large amounts of credit in making this happen have to go to many people around the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, but special thanks to people involved in the real nitty gritty of making the site have to go to :

• Fraser Pearce, Paul Blake, Tom Cartwright, for hard core coding.
• Robert Isitt, Joey Haasbroek, Laurence Wheway, for keeping the project going.
• Sarbast Kefrosh, Victoria Conlan, for server side systems.
• Gareth Ford Williams, for being stompy about Accessibility.
• The Homepage Editorial team, for putting up with us, and escaping their ampersands :-)

* if validating please ensure you validate /home/d/ so the validator gets the UK version of the page which is the new one.

** our statistics system tell us that on a weekday to the UK version of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ homepage we still get 7% of our users using Netscape 4.

Who is Nick Holmes?

Nick leads a team of Client Side Developers for bbc.co.uk. He has worked on the site for 9 years and seen it progress through great innovation and difficult times. He plays a large part of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s standards forums (some say too large) and chairs the Barley, HTML, CSS, Browser Support, Semantic Mark-up and Server resources standards working groups, and is a department representative on more. He is also (recently) become the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s technical contact. He also lurks on the backstage list.