Molly speaks up... #19
...about what..?
(visiting the Royal House of Norway.)
is this a joke..?
Below is the complete content picked up from a web page. Yes, I know it's in Norwegian, but I don't think that matters much in this case.
Proper(?) alt-attributes for two images, and a link. That's all the content I could find on that page. Doesn't give us much of a clue, does it?
Oh, here's some more. The title-element is clearly written as: Royal House of Norway ...so it must be an important page – to some Norwegians at least – I think.
Note [09.may.2007]: The site is updated/upgraded a bit since I wrote this article. You'll find my comments on that in a new article.
a royal joke indeed...
I'm not sure if that page is of much importance to those who have created it, since they haven't even tried to get the message through. Don't they have the slightest clue about accessible web content?
Visit the same, official, page for the Royal House of Norway with an image-enabled browser, and see if the information in those alt-attributes have prepared you for what the images are all about. I don't think so – unless “Morten Krogvold/Scanpix/Jo Michael” have become royals lately. Not to my knowledge...
This screenshot is closer to what you are most likely to find on that page...
...and those four people in front of
the Royal castle is what we Norwegians have come used to lately.
Now, who could have guessed that from the available text on that page. Someone have plugged in a few short lines of complete nonsense behind the royal blue color on that page. It's a royal joke, indeed.
It is also in violation of every accessibility-rule that's ever been created for web-content. However, judging from the rest of that markup, I don't really think those behind it have ever heard about “accessibility”.
no quality control...
“Failed validation, 17 errors”
―
W3C Quality Assurance - HTML Validator
That the validator chokes on it comes as no surprise. Unrecogniseable tag soup with not even a touch of internet-standard, and no Doctype, is not easy to chew. I even had to tell the validator what encoding to use, since it couldn't make that out from the page-code. Miao-auch.
However,I am slightly surprised that no-one else seems to have choked on it. Does this say something about the state of Norwegian web design? Maybe even something about the state of Norway itself?
Just think about it: 17 errors when checked against the lowest common standard – in 86 lines of code. How is that possible? Where's the Quality control?
Not even my author manages to insert more than one or two such human bugs into an ordinary 400 lines web page, and only when he is very, very, tired. He'll fix it at once when I tell him to.
not even trying...
Ok, so the people behind that page and site are not even trying to design for the web or use web standards. Plenty of such people around, but it does give the work-title “web designer” a strange sound.
A bit worse that they are not even trying to design for people who happens to seek information. All information-gathering on the web goes through written words and sentences, and there are no words with useful information on that page for those who need it most.
It's a framed site and although it looks like they have filled the main frame with meta- and noframe-content for search engines, there's no real information there either. Don't they know Google is “blind”?
Try listening to the above through a screen-reader. One has to be pretty well informed beforehand if the above should make any sense. I am not that “enlighted” even though I'm a Norwegian cat all through, and that's why I visited the site in the first place. Bummer!
The whole “thing” is one long list of search engine targeted garbage with no content-value whatsoever. In fact: there's no content at all – just garbage. Such a complete lack of quality and insight is a sorry sight indeed. I've come to expect better from the average homepage that someone have smashed up as a first attempt to impress friends and family, and I'm really sorry that our Norwegian Royal family should be presented across the world on top of such crappy work.
conclusion..?
Well, I usually do have a conclusion, but this is a tough case. Think I'll just point at a few sites that offer help to clueless “web designers”...
...and scedule a revisit to the Royal House of Norway in a couple of years time – if it's still around. I'm not too optimistic.
Norway as an independent constitutional monarchy has passed its 100. birthday – established in 1905. It may last a while longer – regardless of the above mentioned web page, but if you want to know anything about Norway and royalty, then the Wikipedia is a better choice. You may even find my own municipality there... (no, I'm not royal, but does it matter?)
Once again it's time for a sip of warm cow-milk, and maybe a nap or a quick mouse-hunt. I do not really have time for royals and/or crappy web design. There are too many well-designed sites around that are much more fun to visit.
sincerely 
Hageland 14.nov.2005
last rev: 03.aug.2006
Molly speaks up...
