Fundamentos del Análisis Económico  
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About this web site

This document is about the standards we choosed to follow when designing the web site of the Department. It serves also as a bookmarks' page as it collects links to all pages that showed useful when designing the site.

Separating contents from layout

Following an increasing trend in web design, building this site we have separated contents from style, editing HTML files with a minimalistic presentation of the contents and then using a CSS style sheet for the layout.

In both cases we have strictly complied with web standards that ensure universal access to our pages today, and the maximum adaptability to future developments in web technology.

Style sheets have important advantages:

  • They increase download speed as HTML files are not overloaded with code intended for layout only, like tables or font specifications; style is downloaded once with the CSS file.

  • Modern style sheets are media specific so that we can edit a style sheet for screen layout and a different one for the printer or for a Braille browser.

    Style sheets are only read by modern browsers. Nevertheless, since the underlying HTML file contains only structured information, our pages are perfectly accessible, even with text-browsers. Here is how this page would look like in a Lynx browser.

  • Since the HTML files only contain logical subdivisions of the information, any redesign of the entire web site's style is reduced to rewrite a single CSS file.

Web standards

The Department endorses the web standards fixed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The W3C is an organization supported by many institutions world-wide, from academic centers to software corporations, devoted to the establishment of standards that ensure universal access to web contents.

To ensure the greatest degree of compatibility, these pages have been written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. We used the validator to check that we were doing reasonably well.

The style sheets determining the layout of our pages in different media have been checked to follow the CSS2 standard. As with XHTML, style sheets written in proper CSS2 will be compatible with CSS3 compliant browsers, the generation around the corner.

Some non-standards-compliant browsers will not render these pages quite well; here is why we have chosen to write these pages for Netscape anyway.

What technology and when

This site tries to avoid proprietary technology as much as possible. We have chosen to use the Portable Network Graphics PNG format for all images in this site. Here is an explanation why.

We use basic Java scripts, but none is essential for the navigation of the site.

Links we followed...

Guidelines:

Quick references:

Some useful resources:

Some places for inspiration:

HTML Validator CSS Validator