Web Standards

Although we have tried to adhere to current web standards as advocated by The Web Standards Project, we have not been 100% successful. The results of our efforts are described below:

Core Web Standards
Our effort to adhere to XHTML and CSS has been an arduous task for several reasons:
1. Current web standards do not support all features that we wanted to include. The biggest challenges surrounded our choice to use both top and side navigation bars. Another problem area surrounded headings and callouts.
2. Current browsers (Netscape Navigator version 6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6) still have many differences in the way that they render web pages.
3. Very few editors properly support current standards. The on-line editor that we are currently using is part of Microsoft's Internet Explorer product. Unfortunately, this editor is not even HTML 3.2 compliant. As a result, we developed a small program (similar to Tidy) that converts completed web pages to XHTML format. This is currently a manual process that is performed once a page is 'complete'. As such, some pages on the site have not yet been converted to XHTML format.
Client-side Scripting
We have avoided using client-side scripting. It is used simply to allow IE version 6 to use scroll bars in the actual 'data' area of the page. Unfortunately, Netscape does not currently support this feature.

Last Updated: 19 May 2004 3:40:44am