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Opera Web Standards Curriculum

From the introduction: “Learning Web Standards just got easier. Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.”

This is excellent news. Hopefully it will lead to a better web. If you run a consulting company this could be a compulsory course for GUI developers.

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Finnish quality criteria for public websites

The Finnish government has published their quality criteria for public websites in english. This makes it possible to compare your own national guidelines to thos of other countries. Quoting from the intro page:

The purpose of the quality criteria is:

  • to act as a tool for developing and assessing public web services
  • to improve the quality of public web services for both users and producers
  • to increase the benefits from public web services.

I have updated the Index of Government Guidelines page and search engine to include this version.

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Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites

The Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites takes an integrated approach to usability, accessibility and standardization. The purpose of the Guidelines is to support the procurement, development, and maintenance of a website by a public administration so that it offers equal opportunity usage for all citizens. The 2006 version has now been translated to english.

Quoting from the announcement: “The Guidelines are divided into chapters which can be read separately depending on the reader’s role and responsibilities. The order of the chapters is intended to mirror the lifecycle of a website.

  • Chapter 1 covers the overall communications objectives of a website, which should be used as the basis for its development.
  • Chapter 2 presents the development process as steps towards a defined objective.
  • Chapter 3 shows methods for website design and web page coding, along with web standards.
  • Chapters 4 and 5 describe the basic content and services a website should provide, giving additional information on how to write for web-based media as well as methods for keeping the website up to date.
  • Chapters 6, 7 and 8 cover the development of web content for mobile devices, Content Management Systems (CMS) / authoring tools, and assistive technologies (AT).

A survey carried out in February 2007 showed that over 90% of those responsible for public administration websites in Sweden were aware of the Guidelines, with 80% or more actively using them.”

The Guidelines are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Sweden license.