W3C Accessibility validation

[RuralWeb]

I am trying to get the simple search to validate but failing.
Using WebExact gives the following error message:

"For each FORM control, place its label in a LABEL element. A LABEL is attached to a specific form control through the use of the "for" attribute. The value of the "for" attribute must be the same as the value of the "id" attribute of the form control."

The site I am playing with is www.the-old-smokehouse.co.uk and using the home page.

I have played with Act_simplesearch but cannot get it to work. Any html wizards out there!

[Bruce]

Malcolm,

I would suggest having a read of this thread http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=19326 or search for 'W3C Validation' on the forum and you will come up with several threads discussing this topic.

Kind regards,

[RuralWeb]

yeh read all them but they only cover it in general terms. I am looking for a solution to the simple search specifically.

I can get brochure pages to validate at level 3 but when I put the simple search on it drops to level 1 also the script bringing in the section navigation creates multiple tables which again lower the validation to level 2.

There will be a solution out there as I have managed to sort out the other validation problems in the brochure pages.

I think it is a worthwhile exercise as google in particular likes clean code and sites that validate.

[Bruce]

I guess the validation is being effected by the scripts used for the simple search and the navigation. As an experiment can you try replacing the Actinic Navigation with hard coded URL's and for the simple search, take a look at the source code of a page that has the simple search on it and copy the generated code, use this to replace the NQV:SIMPLESEARCH and see if the validation gets any better.

There is an issue with Actinic sites not being able to completely validate because of the use of scripts and NETQUOTEVARS for generation. Would be interested to know if this helps.

Kind regards,

[RuralWeb]

Hi Bruce, I can get the navigation to validate by hardcoding but I would like to get the script to generate the "summary" tag which is all that is required for the tables to validate in terms of accessibility.

The simple search needs a "form control label" but nothing I have tried works. I will give google another bash.

[RuralWeb]

Bruce, Where does NETQUOTEVAR:SIMPLESEARCH get its form from.

[cdicken]

Could you not edit Act_SimpleSearch.html to place the required changes into the simple search template directly?

[RuralWeb]

Ive tried that but I will look at it again - a bit of trial and error is called for I think.

[RuralWeb]

Post amended after the changes caused another error - back to square one!

[RuralWeb]

Im also playing with the compact html option. I can get a site to validate at level 3 with the code uncompacted but the same site when the code is compacted I can only get to level one. This is due to link phrases coming together and only white space between links.

I have also noticed that rankings on google change for the worse when the code is compacted.

Is the idea behind compacting the code purely to speed up download times?

[Kermy]

Compacting the code will help with download time, but will also stop search engines picking up the surrounding template text. We had our pages uncompacted for a while, not realising our words with highest % for most pages were 'actinic' and 'template'. I would never make a site live with HTML uncompacted, especially if your only reason for it is to achieve slightly better W3C compliance.

[RuralWeb]

Interesting theory but doing a search for some of the Actinic Text does not give any results also if I run the site through spider checkers (eg http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go ) the Actinic "bits" are missing although they can be clearly seen in the view source.

Doing a check of some well known Actinic sites shows that several of them are also running on uncompacted code. I think I will leave mine uncompacted as I can see no negative effect on google but I will check the others.

[Kermy]

I'm sure Google et al have the common sense to omit comments, so you're right, it's probably safe enough. Its just that with all the web analysis tools I've used, leaving uncompacted code always seems to skew the results.

[RuralWeb]

Ive been measureing the results by monitoring the ranking of 20 keywords/phrases and there seems to be a slight improvement when the code is uncompacted.

Of course this is highly unscientific and could be caused by all sorts of other factors so other peoples opinions are valued.

[jont]

Uncompacted my single product pages add another 40+ errors when validating the HTML - most of this could be reduced by removing the template comments but that defeats their use.

Personally I always compact the code - not least to foil the casual "view source"