About Web Standards
At Jumping Beans we believe in being inclusive and we wanted to carry this ethos through to our website.
By following Web Standards that are laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) we aim to make our site accessible to as vast a range of people as possible.
There are many different Browsers around other than just Internet Explorer, add to this mobile devices and you see a great deal of ways in which people are accessing the Internet today.
Unfortunatly though, because all of these browsers and mobile devices are built by different companies, they do not all work in the same way. This is where Web Standards come in, if the companies that build browsers and mobile devices didn't have standards to follow, and web designers/developers didn't also follow them, then there would be no guarantee that how a website looks in one browser would look the same in another.
You can read more about this at www.webstandards.org
XHTML Strict
XHTML stands for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language and is the latest version of HTML which is the code (or Markup) that your internet browser reads to display a web page. I have used XHTML Strict which means that it follows the W3C standards the closest, not allowing for any mistakes.
I have tried to write my markup as cleanly as possible, only including the content for the site rather than bloating it out with style rules or javascript. You can view my markup by clicking Page - View Source on your browser if you wish but it's not very exciting!
CSS
For many years website designers and developers had to include all of the style rules for their sites inside the HTML code. This can lead to problems when applying changes or completely re-styling the site. For instance, if you had 20 pages on your site and you decided that you wanted to change a font, then you would have to trawl through each page changing the font wherever you found it. This can be very time consuming.
So the only real solution is to remove all of your style rules from the HTML and instead use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). A CSS file includes the style rules for your whole site and one change to the file will take effect on every page, saving you time and your sanity.
Of course if there are errors in your CSS code then the page may not work the same in every browser so it is important to validate this too.
Cynthia Tested
The Cynthia test is a little different. This is all about accesibility and is administered by the Web Accesibility I**** (WAI).
Web accesibility refers to making your site friendly to people with disabilities, particularly the blind but also people who have trouble using a mouse or a keyboard etc. By displaying the Cynthia Tested button I am proud to say that my site is accessible to all.
For more on Web Accessibility a visit to Link is recomended.
Validation
Validation is the proccess of submitting each page of your site to an automated service which checks for any mistakes in your code and reports back. Mistakes can then be corrected before re-testing. Once your page passes the test you can then display the badge for that test.
If you wish to view thé full reports for the tests that we have passed then please feel free to click on the buttons below (but be warned, these are technical reports!)
Browser Testing
As well as validation I took the time to test this site out in several of the most commonly used browsers including Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7), Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari (MS Windows version). A version for mobile devices is currently being considered, although this site should at least deisplay fairly well as it is.
However, if you have any problems viewing the content of this site or you think that the design looks broken then please feel free to email me at webmaster@gojumpingbeans.co.uk.
Thanks for taking the time to read about Web Standards, I hope you enjoy the site.
To book a FREE trial session at Jumping Beans, or for information on our Dynamites parties for 3 – 8 year olds, please contact:
| Phone: | Sarah on 01424 882684 | or | Melanie on 01580 213476 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email: | sarah@gojumpingbeans.co.uk | or | melanie@gojumpingbeans.co.uk |
