 |
 |
Apologies for cross-posting: Hi all, Many thanks to all who have (so far) tested the site. For those of you who have not yet tried it out, there is still time to do so on www.english-heritage.org.uk/viewfinder. We have had several email responses from list members, in addition to the comments from heritage professionals and members of the public (as far away as Canada) who filled in the feedback form, and we are hoping to make this feedback available to the list if there is general interest in the process. The comments have been very helpful and we have already made some changes in response to frequently occurring problems. Thanks in particular to Peter Gray who took the trouble to test the site very thoroughly with a number of different browsers. Unfortunately we have no jurisdiction over the main English Heritage website, but will forward relevant comments to the web team. We will be looking in detail at the issues raised in relation to the ViewFinder site itself. We are working on replacing with server-side processing some of the JavaScript which may be confusing older browsers, but are generally happy with the way the application is working for most browsers in common use (e.g. Netscape Communicator 4.7 to 7.0). Less than 2% of those who filled in the feedback form were IE4 users, and their comments were very positive. We do recognise the requirement to cater for older browsers, but this does raise the question of exactly how far back we need to go. NOF technical requirements are vague on this : ". Projects must be accessible by a variety of browsers, hardware systems, automated programs and end-users. ". Can I ask whether other projects have addressed this yet? Regarding Peter's comments below, the NOF-Digi requirements for access (5.1.1) are as follows: "Text-based content must be delivered as XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4 in most cases, though the use of XML with other DTDs may sometimes be appropriate." The quoted standards in 2.1.1 relate to creation and storage, and we are not storing our content in HTML. Would anyone from NOF care to clarify? Best Regards Daphne Charles Senior Developer English Heritage > ... > I assume from all this that your designers either didn't > bother to test in anything other than the latest versions of > IE and NS, or didn't know there could be issues with older > browsers, and are not interested in producing valid HTML. > NOF-Digi Requirements, 2.1.1: "HTML and XML documents should > be validated against a published DTD." > > Pete Gray > -- > Peter M Gray > Museums Officer > >