3.1 Documents validate to published formal grammars
The New Zealand Web Standards 2.0 were released in March 2009 and replace the previous version, the New Zealand Government Web Standards 1.0 (below). See Meeting the standards for more information.
The Standard
3.1 Documents, including any web page and/or form, validate to published formal grammars. For NZ government web sites these are:
- HTML 4.01, Strict or Transitional
- XHTML 1.0, Strict or Transitional
- CSS, CSS1 or CSS2
- RSS 1.0
Content produced after 1 April 2004 must publish and validate to the above stated grammars unless the following exception criteria qualify:
- a document that the agency wishes to place on its web site, which is to be or has been produced outside of editorial control of the agency, and cannot be sourced in HTML (or XHTML), or
- a document that the agency wishes to place on its web site, which has all its content duplicated elsewhere within the same web site (where the duplicated content validates to the above stated grammars), or
- it is legitimately not feasible to be made directly accessible.
If content cannot qualify via the exceptions as stated above, an agency must apply for a formal exemption, and consider providing a service that will convert the content "on demand".
Notes:
- Documents qualifying via the exceptions to validating to the formal published grammars in cases i) and iii) must be assisted with a summary of the key points contained within the document (which itself must validate to the approved formal grammars), located such that the summary's association with the document is unambiguous as to which document the summary pertains.
- Documents "legitimately not feasible to be made directly accessible" (as in case iii) of the exception criteria) would qualify as such by being deemed:
- For a "specialist audience" (as defined in the Glossary of key concepts), or
- A "special-purpose document" (as defined in the Glossary of key concepts).
- Documents "made directly accessible" (as in case iii) of the exception criteria). Refer to standard 4.2 regarding the publishing of documents in the most accessible format.
- Selectors, properties and values that are defined in CSS2 must degrade gracefully (as defined in the Glossary of key concepts), in browsers that do not correctly interpret CSS2, or do so poorly.
Guide to this Standard
Conversion of content produced before 1 April 2004 to HTML format is at the discretion of the Agency, subject to the criteria set out in paragraph 4 of the Cabinet Minute (03) 41/2B.
Ensure that:
- Elements are closed properly.
- Elements and content are laid out consistently.
- A document title is provided in the HEAD section of the web page using the TITLE tag. For example, <title>Example title</title>. If an Agency uses the additional meta-tag instance of the document title, it must contain the same information. For example, <meta name="title" content="Example title">.
This standard covers the W3C WAI checkpoint 3.2 for NZ government agencies.
Rationale for this Standard
- The web was founded on Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and HTTP, the protocol for its transport.
- HTML 4.01 is likely to be the last revision of the HTML recommendation based on SGML. Future recommendations for structural mark-up for the web will be based on XML, providing a framework for the language to extend.
- XHTML 1.0 is the first such recommendation based on XML. Some recent browsers support XML-based mark-up like XHTML, as well as the SGML-based HTML. It is likely over time that XML browsers will be the norm, but this is not the case at the time of writing.
