When developing your Web site, it is extremely important to respect the currently accepted guidelines that have been defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) as well as the United States ADA Section 508 standards. If you have funded research, a contract, or a grant that requires compliance with Section 508, be sure to review the details in the Section 508 link above and follow the instructions provided in your funding documents.

It is also important to test your websites to see if they meet these guidelines as well as work across the different technologies that are available to view them. As a recommendation, you shoul use the different validation tools from the W3C and also test your site with different browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari) and operating systems (Windows, Mac) prior to completing it.

XHTML Standards

HTML pages on the RWU.edu domain should conform to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. There are many benefits to using this standard, the main one being that all newer browser versions are being written to this standard, which ensure a longer life for any pages written compliant to XHTML. A few rules to keep in mind to validate with this standard:

• Every tag must be closed by including a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements like <br />, <hr /> and <img src="welcome.jpg" alt="Welcome" /> .
• All tags and their attributes should be writen in lowercase.
• All attributes within tags must be enclosed by quotation marks.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

To keep maintainence to a minimum, you can keep your pages simple when building them in terms of coding and save presentation styles into a CSS file. By then applying the styles from this style sheet to your pages, you will maintain a single resources that ties together all of the styles of your website, making visual updates across the site easier. This process will also create a hierarchy of external stylesheets for your site that allows advanced style definitions only for compliant browsers. Older or non-compliant browser will display the page adequately.

Replace table-based layout with tableless CSS layout

Web sites written without tables can provide a lot of flexibility in design, and developers don't have to touch HTML web pages to change the look and feel.

Accessibility Coding

As a university, we are obligated to make our web site accessible. It is important to remember that some of our visitors will be individuals with disabilities. Several factors must be considered while developing your pages to ensure that all users are able to obtain the information they are trying to access on the site:

• Include the ALT-attribute for all images, image maps and buttons. The text contained in the ALT-attribute should briefly describe the image.
  If your site uses applets, include a description of the function performed by the applets.
  
  
• Avoid using pop-up windows (exceptions for .PDFs & documents and external website links). A blind user may not be able to recognize that a new window has opened.
  
  
• Avoid using various colors to emphasize information on your page or make sure that color is not the only element being used to do this as it may be lost to users with disabilities.
  
  
• Ensure that the elements that require user interaction on your page are accessible from multiple devices linked to the user's computer. For example form elements should be accessible using the mouse or the keyboard.
  
  
• Use testing tools to determine how Browsers designed for people with disabilities will display your Web pages. A good tool for this can be found at: http://www.cast.org/bobby/.
  
  
• As much as possible, provide text transcripts of audio files as well as descriptions of video that are used on your site.
  
  
• Make sure your HTML code "validates" based on W3C specifications (See validators)

Browser Support

Test your site in different browsers. Browsers don't always display pages the same way. A minimum test should be done using Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera on PC, and Safari for Mac.

Screen Resolution

We recommend that you design your page using a screen resolution of 800 X 600.

File naming Conventions

• Only lowercase letters should be used when naming directories and files for consistency.
• Names should not contain any spaces and should be as short as possible.
• Use words that describe the page.
• Keep your filenames smaller than 20 characters.
• Name all graphic files with a prefix that will make them easy to recognize and retrieve.
• Do not use any space or special characters in filenames.

Default File name

Your "start" page should always be "index" or "default" with the extension of the language you are using (html, php, cfm, asp...)