General Criteria

To work out what score you should get for this section just check whether these statements are true in respect to each page of your site, if so then you will be awarded the corresponding points. For judging purposes we may not check every page of your site but the final score for this section will be calculated by averaging the scores obtained by each page that we do check.

Maximum points for each criteria are indicated by the numbers shown in bold preceding each description.

• 01 The home page is correctly named so that the filename does not need to be appended to the URL in order to access it.
   
• 01 Pages should have the HTML version defined in the source. (Where this is not coded the pages will be treated as being HTML 4.01).
   
• 01 Pages should have the language or charset defined in the source. (Where this is not coded the pages will be considered to be using 8 bit unicode).
   
• 01 The web site uses style sheets to control layout and presentation.
   
• 01 The web site does not use font or basefont tags.
   
• 01 The web site uses object tags rather than applet.
   
• 01 The web site does not use deprecated tags other than font and/or basefont.
   
• 01 If images convey important information beyond what is its alternative text then an extended description is provided for those images.
   
• 01 Tables (apart from those used for page layout) contain <thead> and <tbody> sections.
   
• 01 Adjacent links are separated by something other than whitespace.
   
• 01 Links are clearly recognisable from the surrounding content
   
• 07 Compliance to coding standards (subtract 1/2 for each error, can go negative if more than 14 errors)
  The selected page(s) will be tested against the W3C HTML standards. Multiple occurrences of the same error will only be counted once. Only the first two occurrences of similar errors will be counted.
   
  If you want to check your page for yourself first then here is an html validation form that you can use. Alternatively, you might want to download HTML Tidy and use it to validate and fix your page.
   
• 07 Page size (< 30k = 7, < 40k = 6, < 50k = 4, < 60k = 2, < 70k = 1)
  Page size will be calculated by adding together the sizes of all of the files that constitute the page including the html file, all image files, client side scripts, and any multimedia files. Pages accessing a second server will be considered to be 10k larger than their actual size to allow for the extra time required to access the second server. Pages where the server or client side scripting significantly delays the loading of the page may also be assigned a size penalty.
   
  If you want to check your page for yourself first then open the page in Internet Explorer and select Save As from the File menu and in the Save as Type field select Web Page, complete. This will save all of the associated files into a single folder, just copy your original html file to the same folder and check the folder size. This will be the actual size of your page.
   
• 03 Monitor Resolution with no horizontal scrollbar visible (640x480 = 3, 800x600 = 1)
   
  If you want to check your page for yourself first then use the following form (the page supports the screen resolution properly if only one scrollbar is showing):
  Address of page to test:
   
  
   
  Note that the size of the windows opened by these buttons are set to use the space remaining after taking into account space for the windows taskbar and officebar as well as the various toolbars used by the default configurations in Opera 5 (which uses more of the screen than the other browsers). The window shown is therefore the smallest size you can reasonably expect to be available at the specified resolution.
• 02 Pages print correctly without flowing off of the right hand side of an A4 sheet.