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Websites: Jason.Pearce.net
If the design of this website looks relatively coherent, congratulations! Your browser supports the newest web standards like CSS-2, XHTML, and scripting languages. In January 2003, I upgraded my site to comply with these latest web standards.
The
old site made heavy use of tables, invisible spacers, browser-specific
tags, and several other design tricks to achieve its function and form.
The new site, however, separates content from design by using valid XHTML
1.0 Transitional code and Cascading Style Sheets with positioning (CSS2).
These latest standards focus on the separation of style from content. The site's table-less and fluid design better supports nontraditional browsers, from Palm Pilots to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. Additionally, XHTML and CSS enabled my site to become a fully accessible site as described in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 and the Web Accessibility Guidelines.
- This site complies with the WCAG guidelines, priority 1.
- This site complies with Section 508.
- Content and presentation have been separated by the use of style sheets.
- The website is resolution independent and the pages extract or contract to fit the screen.
- Skip to main content feature allows users with screen reading software to skip reading the navigation bar on every page and go directly to the content of the page.
- Font sizes are not fixed thus making it easier for the users to customize the screen to their liking.
- Font sizes can be changed in Internet Explorer through "View" menu and then choosing the text size.
The new site has adopted a few other modern standards: Unicode and Dublin Core Metadata.
The Unicode Standard provides a uniform architecture and encoding for all languages of the world, with over 95,000 characters currently encoded. Unicode is a fundamental component for providing seamless data interchange around the world, and is supported in many operating systems and all modern browsers, and many other products.
The
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative promotes
the widespread adoption of interpretable metadata standards by developing
specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable
more intelligent information discovery systems. Feel free to view this
site's metadata file.
Adopting all of these great features was no easy task. I had a lot of help from online resources such as A List Apart, Jakob Nielsen, and the W3.
Design was also improved. The top navigational bar now uses CSS to create a rollover effect without the use of JavaScript. JavaScript is, however, used to randomly select and display the black and white images that appear in the left column.
| Client: | Jason Pearce |
| Type of work: | Freelance Web Design and Development |
| Description: | Convert site to valid XHTML and CSS standards and meet Section 508 accessibility standards |
| Project role: | I created all of the site's design and developed all of its code. This redesign to XHTML and CSS standards required an extensive amount of hand coding. Dreamweaver and similar WYSIWYGs were used sparingly. |
| Tools used: | EditPlus, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Acrobat |
| Languages used: | XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS-2, DHTML, JavaScript |
| Server resources: | Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) on Linux |
| Size of site: | 140 pages, 35 GIFs, 110 JPGs, 3 PDFs, 2 Flash |
| Validation: | 
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| Accessibility: |
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| Other Standards: | 
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| Website: | jason.pearce.net |
