Current state of the web in Slovenia
- 30th January 2007 | permanent link
- comments (12)
With the web 2.0 boom expanding to all countries of the world (yes, even Slovenia), you would expect that web standards are spreading as well. But a quick glance at this years Izidor (annual award for web excellence) shows that something is rotten (or rotting) in the Slovenian web.
Nominees spreadsheet
To make this evident I have put together a simple spreadsheet of this years nominees, checking their compliance with W3C guidelines. Every nominee was checked for:
- DTD use
- proper charset definition
- used layout technique
- valid (X)HTML
- valid CSS
- valid RSS (as this years competition motto is "social networking", RSS was checked as it is at the very cornerstone of this movement)
- what happens if the images are turned off (can a visitor still make sense of the site)
- what happens if Javascript support is disabled (can a visitor still use the website - graceful degrading)
- WCAG and 508 accessibility
Results
The results were very disappoiting to say the least. Out of the 31 nominees a whopping 9 have not defined their DTD, only 15 decided to use UTF-8 character encoding (5 don't even define the charset), only 6 use CSS for layout, only 2 have valid (X)HTML. Accessibility seems to be an unimportant aspect for all but 2 nominees (feels like its 1999 all over again).
DTD
Charset
Layout
XHTML validation
CSS validation
But there is a bright spot in the spreadsheet - Pediatrična klinika. The mentioned website passed almost all judging categories with flying colors. Apart from a bit too much inline Javascript (which is a crime in its self), this website is a winner from a developers standpoint (not to mention for their innovative approach to modeling the donation network).
Conclusion
Not to hold anything against the folks that organize Izidor, but I belive that candidates should be checked for compliances to the most basic W3C recommendation before they are accepted. Perhaps the motto for next years award should be "Accessible Social Networking", but then I guess nobody would dare enter...
Concept of Izidor was broken in the last year’s competition. My heart was already broken one year ago. Organizers are not WEB people. Unfortunately. That’s why we stopped working with them but they hold the rights for this event. So what can you do?
Yeah, my vote also went to “Pediatrična klinika”. God speed.
I could not agree more with you and Martin!
Martin: Yeah I figured as much. Perhaps this is a call for a new annual award, I just hope that anybody that tries to make it happen has the right idea. And by the way, shouldn't an award be free in the first place? Or at least not 59€, its a bit too much if you ask me.
KhoNS: My point exactly.
Emanuel: Much obliged ^^
were enlisted by mistake. I was actually ill.. I felt even worse
in a way when I recovered and found out about the glitch.
I believe Slovenia is more or less two years behind at all times...
Including SN.. Which is probably why most people either never
understood the criteria, or thought that it's impossible that this
will be the only judged characteristic.
$0.02: We have to face the fact that myspace is the most widely
acknowledged SN/ Web20 site.. Yet anyone with decent web
experience knows to stay away from it as far as they can.
There will probably always be sites that will focus purely on the
effect that proper/new technologies bring, and sites that try to
stay decent in their implementation of the available standards
and explore fresh approaches too. And the people who'll be able
to tell them apart will remain a minority. Thumbs up for the report!
P.s.: Your characters are small and they enlarge with render
issues in Opera :-I .. It probably chokes on relative type sizes.
Fonts are fine on my computer(s) but headings which are images get... messed up. Unfortunately.
And yes, Miha, your column sizes are not defined relatively. Hence, contnet get's all messed up and unuseable if a very narrow sighted person enlarges the fonts out of props (unlikely many users will do that but hey, if we're bitchy about everything, let's be bitchy about that too) :)
Oh well... what'cha gonna do about it?
described appears to be related to an issue in Operas font rendering. I hadn't noticed
this before, but it seems that 'random' lines get messy only after scrolling an enlarged
website. At first I thought it was because of your percentage font sizes, but I managed
to recreate the bug with pixel sizes as well. I guess it will go away in future revisions..
Here's a shot so you know what I'm reffering to: http://shrani.si/files/hroperroru4vx.gif
P.S: Sorry for the topic-hijack :-P