Wood and Wire

I’ve just heard that Australians at Work, a site we built for Film Australia, is a finalist in the Best Learning category of the 12th Annual AIMIA Awards. We’re thrilled because it’s a site we’re particularly proud of — especially from a technical point of view.

For a site that is based around video, Australians at Work exhibits an unusually high level of web-standards compliance. We used content negotiation techniques to dynamically serve 2 levels of standards-compliant code. Where browsers send an http accept header that indicates they are fully XHTML compatible, the pages are served as XHTML 1.0 Strict, using the “application/xhtml+xml” mime type in accordance with W3C recommendations. When accessed by older browsers, the page is converted to HTML 4.01 Strict and served as “text/html”. In both cases all pages have been validated using the W3C validator tool. This ensures they are 100% syntactically correct.

This level of standards compliance (ie. serving valid XHTML with the correct mime type) is still quite rare. I would imagine that this is the only public-sector site in Australia that offers this level of web-standards compliance.

We also put a lot of effort into making the video content as accessible as possible. We used Flash for the video and designed for maximum accessibility by attaching accessible text to all essential controls and by implementing keyboard shortcuts for those controls. By using “.swf” files for video rather than the more common “.flv” format, we were able to extend compatibility to users with version 6 of the Flash player, whereas most sites using Flash video require version 7.

Anyway, we’re up against some stiff competition in the final round, and most of the competing sites are certainly more flamboyant and graphically rich. Having been an AIMIA awards judge myself, I know that immediate visual appeal and ‘wow factor’ usually counts for more than what’s under the bonnet – but here’s hoping!

Something I’m enjoying reading at the moment: 24 ways to impress your friends is a sort of geek’s advent calendar. Each day there’s a new tip covering some of the latest techniques in standards-based (mostly!) web design.

All of them are well thought out and well written.

I’ve been playing with the final release of Firefox 1.5 for a few days now, and I’m really quite impressed — although it’s fair to say that most of the improvements won’t even be noticed by the average user.

Of course there are speed improvements and subtle interface tweaks, but the really important developments are Firefox’s support for emerging web standards such as CSS3, SVG and XSLT. (more…)

Alex Robinson has written In search of the One True Layout — a really comprehensive wrap-up of the challenges involved in building sophisticated pure-css layouts.

Recommended reading for those of us who work all the hours god sends getting css layouts to work in the browser that Bill sends.