UKOLN AHDS QA Focus in-house QA: Policy on Web Standards



QA Focus Policy

Area:
Web Standards
Policy:
QA Focus Web pages will be based primarily on XHTML 1.0 Transitional and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). Resources should comply fully with the appropriate standards.

We will normally use one of the following DOCTYPE declarations:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

The following xmlns declaration will be used for the XHTML namespace:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">

Justification:
Compliance with appropriate standards should ensure that access to Web resources is maximised and that resources can be repurposed using tools such as XSLT.
Responsibilities:
The QA Focus project manager is responsible for this policy. The QA Focus Web editor is responsible for ensuring that appropriate procedures are deployed.
Exceptions:
Resources which are derived automatically from other formats (such as MS PowerPoint) need not comply with standards. In cases where compliance with this policy is felt to be difficult to implement the policy may be broken. However in such cases the project manager must give agreement and the reasons for the decision must be documented.

Procedures For Ensuring Compliance

We will implement the following procedures on Web standards to ensure that the policies are implemented.