This resource has been drawn from discussions in the General Forum of the Australian Flexible Learning Community during the period July 2002 to December 2004. Many thanks to all who contributed.

We all know we have to create our web pages so those using enabling technologies can ‘see’ them and so on but what does that really mean?

Does anyone know of a plain English checklist to be used by librarians who want to write Websites which are W3C-compliant? (Pls! don't give me the URL for the 50-pager for online developers!!) What's needed is a checklist in super-simple language that would help me & my colleagues compose pages in Word documents that will then be handed on to a professional online developer. BUT we want to set those Word documents out in such a way that the developer has to make only minimal text/layout changes before coding & uploading.

The reason we're interested in W3C-compliance is that we're a govt educational organisation (TAFE) & so must ensure that our resources are accessible to as many students/clients as possible + we want to honour "access & equity" principles in govt service. According to the online developer, there ARE things we content writers can do which will make his job easier (eg: providing captions for every cartoon, avoiding flash & all moving objects)

Almost immediately, help arrived in the form of a list of useful URLs.

Access & Equity in Online Learning Webpage
www.flexiblelearning.net.au/accessequity/

Guidelines page
www.flexiblelearning.net.au/accessequity/guidelines/guidelines.htm

Examples of "checklist" type documents related to specific equity groups:
Learners with Disabilities www.flexiblelearning.net.au/accessequity/downloads/R011RSb.pdf

Learners with English Literacy needs
www.flexiblelearning.net.au/accessequity/downloads/R011RSc.pdf

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners
www.flexiblelearning.net.au/accessequity/downloads/R011RSa.pdf

But, as is often the case in the Australian Flexible Learning Community, there was more to come.

I have a few tips for word docs that will be marked up for the web:

• use the document map feature of Word (haven't done this myself, yet)
• to loose all that horrible code that word puts in your text, we found that we opened the file in Wordpad, THEN saved again, the horrible, heavy, pointless code disappears.

Horrible code that Word puts in your text? What’s that all about?

Apparently, when you use web-publishing software like FrontPage, it identifies all the behind the scenes coding that your word processor uses to make your documents look good. This makes it really difficult for FrontPage to figure out what you actually want to show on the web page.

Think about it this way… A Word document's final destination is to be printed on paper. So when you create it, the Word program adds instructions for things like margins and page breaks. On the other hand, web pages are destined to be displayed on a screen, not printed on paper. So, there are differences. For example, the length of a web page is indeterminate. There are no page breaks or print margins needed.  So when this formatting is copied to web pages the whole thing gets confused by all the instructions that aren’t needed.

If you use the Insert/File way to insert a document, you get tidy HTML with not one scrap of "horrible, heavy, pointless code".

There are other considerations.

You must also be aware that people who are viewing your articles may have a different screen resolution, monitor size and colour display plus they will be viewed on a wide variety of platforms, operating systems and browsers. This is why it important to eliminate all unnecessary code and try and make your website as compliant with W3C as possible.

All contributors to this discussion agree on the best way to do this - use notepad or another text editor when writing for the web. However, there was a final suggestion that’s worth passing on.

Totally agree on the use of notepad and other text/html editors. Personally I'm in love with EditPlus http://www.editplus.com/ .

Additionally, How to Make Web Pages W3C Compliant, compiled by Susan Brunner, is a winner.