Blue Elephant Referee Scheduler

Page Presentation & Semantics: Cascading Style Sheets

Intro:

Any website needs a common theme across the board to allow for maximum usability. It includes the shape, position and look of the various page elements. The website needs to be accessed by any home Internet user, so the site must render on a wide variety of platforms and browsers. Certain users are disabled, so great care must be taken to accommodate them. This means making the website accessible to color-blind users, and to render pages semantically. That is to say that all content should be marked up with metadata describing the nature of the content (error, heading, etc). Presentational information should be separate, and should be optional.

Motivation:

With Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, all presentational and theme information can be centrally managed in a single file, and can be kept separate from the semantic content of web pages.

Usage:

All presentation information for the Referee Scheduler is currently kept in the file main.css in the root directory of the application. Web pages are marked up semantically, and are near XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.

Links:

The Semantic Web http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

CSS Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com/

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

Accessibility Validator http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

Examples:

See next page

Presentation under Internet Explorer and Netscape6+/Mozilla:

Simple Presentation under Netscape 4:

Text-mode Presentation: