Introduction to Web Standards including Accessiblity

Release: 2008-01-27
Jump to Web Standards Articles TOC

Introduction

 This collection of articles is split into multiple modules. This introduction gives some brief background of the Web and provides some information on why standards are necessary for the web platform and common terms.

 A brief history of the main markup languages used.

How to code webpages according to the XHTML standards. Essentially markup such as XML and XHTML provide the document structure only and Cascade Stylesheets provide the layout and presentation (visual and audio).

Plus information on the OASIS OpenDocument for Office Applications format.

Web Browsers And Packages provide information on the main programs that use or should support Web Standards such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Plus The Web Browser Generations categorise browsers based on practical web content support.

The Web

The World Wide Web or The Web is made up of loads of web server computers connected to each other like a global network or Internet. Originally the Internet was developed for military remote communication and multiple location research and academic information distribution. It expanded into the public domain for personal websites, brochures and Electronic-commerce or eCommerce websites.

Boundaries of access continue to spread with the help of Web Standards including Accessibility to allow people with visual, audio, cognitive and motor disabilities to access what would have been proprietary, clumsy and Old-skool coding. It is also useful when in situations like accessing information with a voice and text-to-speech device while for instance driving: such as Satellite Navigation or a voice activated wireless internet for that last minute check on plane, train or hotel info on your way to the airport or station. Plus accessing information on embedded kiosk terminals or wireless tablets including mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). For business', these could make your Business Information Structure more interoperable with partners, other departments and consumers.

In addition to desktops, workstations and mobile devices, Web Standards and Accessibility could allow for future devices such as Microwaves, Fridges, Oven Cookers to access the World Wide Web. Just think, download a recipe that would not only be presented as a human readable form on a cooker or microwave on-screen but also have appropriate data to let the cooker or microwave self configure the settings for what you are about to cook. The same principle can be applied to almost any machinery: ATM Systems, Corporate Forms, etc.

People wonder why they should change their website to follow the best practices of web standards and accessibility when their website seems to work fine now. Well, that's like saying why not have builders, car manufacturers, food processor plants just use any old hammer, nail and box to do their job and hope it stays intact.
 You want them to use the best tools for the job and also observe safety protocols.
Using the proper markup languages such as HTML, XML or XHTML for document structure and Cascade Stylesheets for styling, including laying out the information on that document, are a couple of the right tools for building webpages and web applications.

Most older webpage coding (and some current ones too) are clumsy and messy which forced web browsers to bloat with extra code just to fix all the messy errors in the copies of webpages that it receives from webservers.
This is also a two way thing: not only are website, document and web application authors advised to follow web standards but application developers are advised to support web standards and accessibility in their applications that render webpages or that will be used by anyone.

Terms And Conventions

Web-enabled products are not just limited to Web Browsers, they could be an editor that downloads a webpage into itself, an application or operating system component that uses web technologies to present the information or to render its own appearance and functionality. Also it could be a text-to-speech or text-to-braille device. Thus User Agent is a known term to refer to anything that will render webpages (HTML, XML, XHTML, etc). In the following articles I also refer to User Agents as environments.

URIs And IRIs

All the resources on the World Wide Web are identified by a URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A URI can be one of two types: a URL or a URN.
A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator and is the most familiar of URIs. Such URL type URIs are http:// and ftp:// addresses.

URLs can have a Fragment part at the end represented as a hash or sharp character (#) followed by an unique identifier that usually points to an ID type attribute with the same value in markup languages like XHTML (or the olden day <a name=""> </a> element from HTML):

Plus URLs can have an optional query string denoted by a question mark and the variable=value pair separated by an ampersand (&):

Although the ampersand would be & within markup languages.
The above examples are absolute URIs, but you can use relative URIs that are automatically converted to absolute by whatever environment like a web browser:

The web browser would take the relative URI and prefix the URI of the current document, without the document's filename, to create an absolute URI. For referring to things in another folder near the current one you use the ../ for 'up-one-level'. So the last example is referring to 'me.xhtml' in the 'otherfolder' folder that is beside the folder that you are in.

A URN is a Uniform Resource Name such as ISBNs for publications and also several organizations use URNs to access built in schemas, etc.

IRI stands for Internationalized Resource Identifier and is basically a URI that supports non-Latin characters.

MIME Media Types

Most resources on the Internet are also categorized to a MIME Media Type such as text/plain for text files (and the default for uncategorised files), audio/mpeg for mp3 audio, image/png for Portable Network Graphics (PNG), text/html for HTML webpages, text/css for Cascade Stylesheets, application/xml for XML Documents, application/xhtml+xml for XHTML webpages and image/svg+xml for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

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