About

This seems to be rediculous but it's nevertheless one of the basic requirements: Having nice and clean HTML code is not only a prerequisite for automatic tests by some validation engines but also for human-eye and manual evaluation of a site's accessibility. And: if you really want to judge the accessiblity of a site, you cannot rely on automated tests. Real accessibility evaluation is still done by humans surfing the site, looking a the code... What does that mean to us:

• avoid use of inline javascript except event-handling code (http://www.biene-award.de/award/kriterien/kritpruef.cfm/group.5#419)

• have also some human readable HTML code which is nicely structured by linebreaks, comments etc. (look at the code of some best-practice sites e.g. http://www.theologisches-seminar-elstal.de/ using Typo3 or http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/)

In the following, I have pulled out some examples and tried to discuss them - as far as I could do that. But I cannot judge that really..

• HTMl is meant for machines not for people. Most of the theme html is generated, and require special effort to make it pretty. Page content is generated also, and required formatter changes to make it prettier.

  If you want to evaluate the code, filter the html through tidy

  tidy -indent moin.html

  The result: moin-tidy.html.

Examples

Example 1

HTML code of 'FrontPage' in Moin 1.5.6.

• compile_huge_and_ugly = 0.000s
• getACL = 0.017s
• load_multi_cfg = 0.000s
• run = 0.098s
• send_page = 0.082s
• send_page_content = 0.030s
• total = 0.100s

moin.html

Discussion

• Is Javascript code in line 11-77 an event-handler code or could this move in common.js? ( Done for Moin 1.6)

• Do we still need the "link rel" in line 92-98? They render strange and are quite disturbing in textbrowsers see AccessibleHtmlLayout#LinkRel

  • Well if textbrowsers render them badly it is there fault. These are especially nice for accessibility. This enables somebody to say index to an audio-enabled browser and be led to the index page instead of having to read the page to find out where the index is! -- ThiloPfennig 2006-12-03 13:38:50

    • Ok. I didn't know the purpose of that. Your are right, we should forget about Lynx, but on XP only Opera support this feature currently. It looks like this: . Not supported by IE, no default support by Firefox but plugin available. Annotation: I like this feature. Would be nice if slideshow would also set "link rel" for first, last, previous, next, up.. This is currently not working. It's working for subpages in Moin ('up'). Maybe we should also have a "link rel" to the copyrights and disclaimers of the wiki which can be set by some wikiconfig.py para. Having copyrights and contact information easily available is also one of the evaluation criterias for accessibility..

    • Not forget about text browsers but they need to work on this part. They could also decide not to display this.-- ThiloPfennig 2006-12-04 20:49:40

• Page content in 194-207 is close to unreadable.
  • Is it possible to have more linebreaks here for structuring?

  • FeatureRequests/ShorterPageInternalLinks and patch for that at FeatureRequests/NicerHeadingIds

Minor point: Strange linebreaks in line 6-11. Does this separation convey some logic?

Example 2

Include some source code with syntaxhighlighting on some page that allows to toggle line numbers. Whole javascript code is placed inline into the page. Is this a event-handler code? Could this move to common.js?

Example 3

When editing a page (text-edit), the javascript code for the count-down is placed rigth above <link rel="Start" href="/MoinMoinWiki">. Wouldn't it be better to have one script section in the header or at least: All the scripts in one block??

Example 4

Same is true for gui-edit.

Example 5

We should check also all common actions (fileattach, diff, info..) on a page an have a look at human readablitiy especially in the content area, maybe introduce more linebreaks here etc.. But I cannot judge that..

General Discussion

• This is really an annoying topic since everthing seems to work fine in Moin and why do this?? Nevertheless - I think - we should face this.. The question is: to what extend? what is possible? what is desired from the programmers' point of view?
• Can we place the long texts in extra files, so that I do not have to scroll through all this? This would also allow to link to those examples directly from different pages.

Please help with the related (hopefully accessible) ThemeMarket/SimpleMente theme.

Conclusions

• Who feels accountable for that and could help with some patches? Some changes - as far as i can judge this - are needed.. Or what do you think?