A Wonderful Coincidence?
A few months ago my school arranged a democracy day. All students wrote their own proposals (as the real parliament does) and we were divided into groups depending on the topic our proposal touched on. I happened to be placed in the group discussing IT and traffic questions. :)
My proposal was a long one, I carefully explained who makes up the WWW standards and the importance of following those standars so that people, no matter what webbrowser, operating system or device they use to access the information, can still view it.
The proposal got a final touch of importance by adding a table showing how many errors and warnings some common government or government related sites had in their markup. Some pages had as much as 400 errors and no valid DOCTYPE declarations.
Of course actual politicians were there to celebrate the event and take part in the discussions. Their staff people (from the parliament) and the teachers at my school had previously read through all the proposals and most of the politicians had done that as well.
Today, a few months later, the Swedish government’s entire website (www.regeringen.se and www.sweden.gov.se) is facing a re-design to increase the usability and availability by making sure their web sites comply with the XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0 standards as well as the WAI guidelines.
A funny coincidence? Not that it matters, but it would feel good to know I’ve made a difference.
July 6th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Either way, sounds like a good proposal :)
July 6th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
Hehe, good proposal, and good that something is now being some about it :)