August 2004 Audit

An audit was made of the QA Focus Web site on Wednesday 11th August 2004.

HTML Validation

The ,rvalidate HTML validation tool was run over the entire QA Focus Web site from the entry points listed below:

Area Report Comments Current findings
QA Focus entry point [View report] All resources compliant, but only 100 pages checked. [Validate]
Documents Area [View report] All resources compliant, but only 100 pages checked. [Validate]
Surveys [View report] All 40 resources compliant. [Validate]
QA Area [View report] All 38 resources compliant. [Validate]

Comments

Based on these findings the areas audited have been found to be valid HTML.

There have been problems with the missing div element in the QA Focus News Blog. This problem has now been resolved by manually changing the pages.

Note that the audit trail reports were initially not HTML compliant and also contained broken links. The following elements had to be added to avoid these problems:

<base href="http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Note: the ,rvalidate validation tool cannot currently be used on the database area of the site.

CSS Validation

The ,cssvalidate tool was run over selected resources on the QA Focus Web site in order to validate a number of the external stylesheet files. The check was carried out from the entry points listed in the following table.

Area Comments Current findings
QA Focus entry point Valid CSS file. [Validate]
Documents Area Valid CSS file. [Validate]
Case Studies Valid CSS file. [Validate]
Surveys Valid CSS file. [Validate]
Presentations Area Valid CSS file. [Validate]

Results

The CSS files checked appeared to comply with the CSS standard.

Comments

Note that the validation was carried out using a remote testing service. Since the QA Focus Web site used user-agent negotiation to provide a simplified CSS file to old Netscape browsers this CSS file will not necessarily be validated. Also not that inline CSS declarations on resources on the Web site will not be checked.

Exceptions: This form of validating does not cover inline style sheets. The toolkit area of the site uses inline stylesheets so was checked manually.

Link Checking

The ,rchecklink Tool

The ,rchecklink tool was run over the entire QA Focus site from the points listed below:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/surveys/

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/toolkit/

Area Report Comments Current findings
QA Focus entry point [View report] Analysis timed out before completion. [Check]
Documents Area [View report] Analysis timed out before completion. [Check]
Surveys [View report] Analysis timed out before completion. [Check]
QA Area [View report] Analysis timed out before completion. [Check]
Toolkit Area [View report] No errors. 5 documents checked. [Check]
Results

A number of broken links were detected. These were due to changes by external Web sites.

Comments

Note that the link-checking tools do have some limitations. For example some Web sites have a short 'time out' time, others blocked access to checking tools by the robots.txt, the Web site may be temporarily unavailable, etc.

The Xenu Tool

In addition to the tool described above the Xenu software (version 1.2d) was also used to link-check the QA Focus site. This tool was used in order to ensure that all resources on the QA Focus Web site were checked and to see if any link problems not detected by the ,rchecklink tool were found.

Xenu was used first to check local links. Then was used to check all links.

Results

The Xenu link check results for local links and external links are available. A number of link problems not detected in the above reports were found. These problems are being investigated. Note that some problems are artifacts of the link checking process.

An audit is also made of JISC 5/99 projects Web sites to check that they still exist. This is done by running a link checker over http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/qa/audits/599sites/. Missing sites are noted and changes are made to the QA Focus database.

Spell Checking

The NetMechanic spell checker was run over the entire QA Focus site from the points listed below:

Results

Four spelling mistakes were found which were corrected.

Comments

NetMechanic only checks up to 5 pages in one go.