I tood the liberty check to latest version of the Quick Cart for validation in XHTML 1.1 and WCAG A, AA, AAA and WCAG 2.0 L2 and it doesn´t come out clean.
XHTML 1.1 it gets the following remark: Conflict between Mime Type and Document Type
WCAG A, AA and AAA It passes A but not AA or AAA
WCAG 2.0 L2 It doesn´t pass and gets a total of 5 known problems and 10 likely problems.
Maybe there is something with the demo page that the Quick Cart is palced on for the demo or there is something which is not up to the W3C standard in the program.
Will you make the Qucik Cart to meet the W3C standard?
boffa - thanks for suggestions. We will check this WCAG etc. We have in plans to valid WAI and www.section508.gov too.
About standards we are very interested in. If You will check our code then You will see that we dont use tables too much etc.
About XHTML 1.1: - first our site validate "This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.1!" - second this conflict will be until older browsers like IE 5.x and 6.x etc. will be still over 2-3% in all browsers. This old browsers dont accept type "application/xhtml+xml" and we must use "text/html" mime type because we want to correct display our cart in older browsers too.
Read this: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
For our defense ... look for most shopping carts. Most use tables and HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0 transitional. XHTML 1.0 strict or XHTML 1.1 You will find few.
Please find me how many shopping carts use correct XHTML 1.0 strict or XHTML 1.1, with WAI validation, section 508 validation.
Dont get me wrong, of course we are thinking how to improve our shopping cart with another standards.
boffa
2007-08-23 19:44
Hi Treewood
I did some deeper checking and found out that the WCAG 1.0 AA and AAA (priority 2 and 3) will be very hard for you to achieve since they demand (one of their requests) that you can´t use the same type of heading after each other and I think this is a must for a shop with products in a column. After this I, at least, is very happy with that you have achieved the A (priority 1) standard.
CSS and XHTML 1.1 validates very good when looking into it a bit deeper.
I have one thing to ad and maybe it will be of some help for someone.
When adding a link to the software and useing the attribute _blank it will not validate. Do the folling instead:
Create a javascript like this:
window.onload = function() { var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (var i=0;i < links.length;i++) { if (links[i].className == 'new-window') { links[i].onclick = function() { window.open(this.href); return false; }; } } };
Save it as a .js file under the js directory (name it whatever). Ad the link to the page.tpl file in the templates directory under the head section.
Call the function with class="new-window"
This will give the _blank function for the link and validates as well.
for the benefit of knuckleheads like me what exactly does all this do? - does it have anything to do with a href link?
boffa
2007-08-26 21:21
Hi idaryl
Yep, it's all about href link that opens in a new window (_blank). If you do it the way I described on 2007-08-23 the shop (QuickCart) will still validates according to the W3C standards for XHTML and the WCAG 1.0 A which I believe is important.
The QuickCart team has done a very good job making sure that the QuickCart program validates (it's not an easy task, I know) and thats a quality mark of the program. If you use _blank for a href link that opens in a new window you will destroy this validation and thereby lower the quality of the program.
My small contribution was a solution that keeps the validation and still gives you a href link that open up in a new window.
Thats all
Boffa
Gerry
2010-01-09 01:05
@boffa: I know this might come a bit late for some, but I found this thread only just now. I do fully agree that complying with web standards is important. Yet web standards and accessibility are not about earning chocolate for having been busy making some Validator believe all is just fine. Sorry to say, but your suggestion to use a Javascript to "keep the validator from realizing" you are passing the page focus to a new window is completely missing the point of complying with web standards. And what's even worse, it's making the site less accessible. Levels A to AAA are describing means to gradually making web pages more accessible to users, not to make validators happy. If you pardon this metaphor, you burn down the house to get rid of a hole in the roof.
