Will The UK Government Shut Down The Queen’s Web Site?

In a post on All UK Government Web Sites Must Be WCAG AA Compliant I recently warned of the dangers that the UK Government’s blunt instrument of mandating that all UK government Web sites must comply with WCAG AA accessibility guidelines could be counter-productive as the current WCAG 1.0 guidelines are widely felt to be out-of-date and government departments which seek to comply with the guidelines may well result in Web design patterns which are now widely felt to enhance the effectiveness of Web sites but which infringe guidelines released back in 1998 being discarded.

I recently viewed the Official Web Site of the British Monarchy (don’t ask) and spotted a visible <FONT> tag preceding a news item about the Queen’s speeches in Uganda.

Surely the Queen’s Web site isn’t using <FONT> tags, I thought? The Queen can’t possibly have employed a self-taught Web coder who hasn’t updated their skills in over five years? But looking at the source code and validating the page my worst fears came true: 36 HTML errors, no DOCTYPE, spacer GIFs, unclosed <FONT> tags (as I had spotted), <IMG> tags with no ALT attributes, a mixture of XHTML and HTML elements, …

Now this page clearly fails to comply with the UK Government proposed accessibility requirements. What, then, will happen if these proposals are accepted and the Queen fails to correct the errors by next year’s deadline? Will the Government attempt to shut down Her Majesty’s Web site? Will the Government take the Queen to court? But won’t “Regina vs Regina ” lead to a constitutional crisis? Will this lead to the demise of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic? Or will such a vindictive move by pedantic civil servants lead to a backlash, with the possibility of the Tower for the more extreme of the ‘accessibility standardistas‘?

More seriously the British Monarchy Web site probably does provide a good example of a service (perhaps not quite a public-sector service, though) which would be improved by simply following the WCAG guidelines.  So maybe my concerns would only apply to those Web sites which are seeking to be more interactive and user-focussed than the brochureware approach which the British Monarchy site provides.

HTML Email - Views From The Grizzled Techies And Evil Marketeers

“One of our web officers has been asking about whether there’s any good, reasonably priced training in creating HTML mails. If anyone has any experience with this, would you let me know?“

That message, sent recently to the web-support JISCMail list seemed a reasonable request for information. So I was surprised to see responses saying “I can give you a complete course right now. Don’t do it“, “If people learn to write they don’t need HTML to spice their text” and “the people that want it are the very last people that should be allowed to have it. To me, the reception of HTML email from an organisation is a great big hint that I never ever want to deal with that organisation.“

Well, there are some unequivocal positions! And loo0k at that last comments: “the people that want it are the very last people that should be allowed to have it.” What happened to having a user-focussed approach to Web development?

Fortunately there were other responses to the debate which took a more holistic view: “Don’t just say ‘No’, say ‘Let US do it’, or at least ‘Let us get involved’. Take control if possible. Otherwise they’ll just do it anyway, and quite possibly do it (very) badly.“

The debate seemed to polarise the “grizzled techies” and the “evil marketing managers”. One of the latter gave his reasons for making use of HTML in email:

As the resident evil marketing manager on the list I’ve tried to restrain myself but can’t hold back any longer…

We always use HTML based e-mail for our marketing (we send multipart e-mails with a text version so that most users should see something on their screen). All our e-mail marketing is opt-in and we give an unsubscribe link on every message sent, partly because that’s the law, but mainly because it’s polite - we’re happy that our unsubscribe rate is reasonably low.e developed a set of corporate templates which were thoroughly tested with Outlook, Outlook express, Hotmail, Gmail, Mac mail, et al (if you think getting HTML to render in a variety of browsers is fun wait until you start developing HTML e-mail!). Every message we send is sent to test accounts using a variety of e-mail services before we send in bulk.

It does strike me that there are two polarised communities. Coincidentally around the time this discussion was taking place I attended the Aoc Nilta conference, at which, as described in a posting by Scott Wilson, personalisation was one of the key themes of the conference (and, as described recently by the BBC, is also on the Government’s agenda).

My view? I’m on the side of providing flexibility for the user community - and if the marketing community are the ones who try to respond to the users’ needs, then we should be working more closely with that group, rather than the dated technical views of the grizzled techies!

Christmas Quiz II - An Answer

In the Christmas Quiz II posting I asked the question:

The current version of HTML is XHTML 1.1. What is the next version likely to be:
XHTML 1.2 XHTML 2 HTML 5

There were two responses to this question which I will discuss in more detail: