Standards Compliance
This page details our general specification for Websites and Intranets. It satisfies the United Kingdom's e-Government Interoperability Framework and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, as revised.
MKDoc can be used to create web sites which comply with e-GIF v2.0 however there is not yet support for everything required by e-GMS v3.0 for Web Sites.
Public Functionality
The website shall be accessible via all browsers. Javascript, Java and Microsoft specific extensions shall not be required to access the site content.
The website must have a consistent format, controlled with templates, and shall provide the following:
- Documents
- All documents shall be valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 Transitional or Strict. All documents shall comply with W3C WAI Double-A or better. All documents shall be encoded to Unicode / UTF-8.
- Site Structure
- Documents shall be hierarchically related to each other. All documents, apart from the home page, must have a parent document and may have as many child and sibling documents as required.
- Document URLs / URIs
- Document URLs shall not use query strings (e.g. http://example.com/document?id=123). All documents must have URLs / URIs which comply with the UK Government website filename conventions, i.e. they should be lower-case US-ASCII, and the only allowed punctuation is the dash character ([a-z] [0-9] [-]).
- Navigation
- All documents shall have dynamically generated navigation consisting of the following elements:
- A standard navigation menu.
- Breadcrumb trail navigation bar.
- Child document listing.
- Sibling document listing.
- Search
- All documents should have a search input form for conducting site searches. The search facility should work for documents in any language and character set.
- Sitemap
- All documents shall be linked to and from a sitemap. The sitemap shall be dynamically generated and reflect changes to the site in real time.
- Metadata
- All documents shall have associated Dublin Core metadata and this should be presented in one or more of the following ways:
- XHTML / HTML metadata in the document <head>.
- In an associated XML file.
- In an associated RDF / XML file.
Administrator Functionality
All content must be editable via a web interface: this interface shall comply with W3C WAI 1.0 Single-A and W3C ATAG 1.0.
Javascript, Java and Microsoft specific extensions shall not be required to manage the site content.
Standards
Compliance with the following standards is mandatory.
W3C Standards
- HTML 4.01
- XHTML 1.0
- Cascading Style Sheets, level 1
- Cascading Style Sheets, level 2
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
- Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Dublin Core Standards
- Recording qualified Dublin Core metadata in HTML meta elements
- Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML
- Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML
UK Government Standards
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