Last update:
Friday, August 30, 2002 2:47 AM

Website Work Group

The Tien Phong Newspaper, Information Center (Central Science and Education department) and NetNam Company (IT Institute) jointly organize a Webdesign contest. Please read more about this contest.

The Website work group is currently working with the change from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0 standard coding. Your ideas and help are more then welcomed!

We are also continuing with the translation of all pages into Vietnamese (charset=utf-8).

Main areas of the Work Group:
The Design of the site
Software and Hardware problems
Using standards
Development
Accessibility

Another very interesting task is to start translate W3C recommendations into Vietnamese. Our goal is to publish the ones we think are important for the use and development of Internet in Vietnam starting with Accessibility, HTML 4.01, CSS2 and XHTML 1.0.

You can join our mailinglist by filling in the following form:

Website links

The design of the site

This site is designed for the current situation in Vietnam with low connection speed as one element. It is also a goal to make it accessible for as many people as possible. In order to do so it does not include a lot of "bells and whistlers" and we are concerned in using W3C standards.

The design is very simple and consists of a header with logo and language choices. Under the red topbar and flags there is a separation line that also act as a shortcut to the main page. This is good for people using screenreaders so that they do not have to scroll through the navigation table all the time. To the left we have a very simple navigation table. Both the header and the navigation table are the same for all pages.

To the left you can also se when this page was last updated and also send an e-mail to the webmaster if you have any questions and/or suggestions.

Software / Hardware problems

It is our goal that our pages should be accessible regarding software or hardware. That means that you should be able to use any kind of browser to se this page. To do so we are also developing some small sites for wap telephones (.wml).

It should be possible to view the ISOC Vietnam pages on an 14" monitor with 640x480 resolution.

We do not have any framed pages because they are not easy to bookmark and difficult if not impossible to read with screenreaders.

Using standards

This site is built on the W3C XHTML 1.0 standard
(DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"). We changed from HTML 4.01 in February 2002.

We have been very moderate with images and other features that may slow down the download speed of our pages.

We recommend that you use W3C Internet standards when making Webpages It makes your page more accessible, more flexible and consistent. Every page (code) should start with stating what standard it uses.

Our goal is to have all our pages validated by W3C (XHTML 1.0, CSS) and to be BOBBY A level approved.

If you would like to test your own sites towards these international standards please look at W3C homepage for validation (http://validator.w3.org/, http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) and at Cast Bobby site (http://www.cast.org/bobby/).

Development

We are looking for people to help out. If you think that you could improve the appearance of this site and keep the mentioned requirements, please contact current webmaster. Any suggestions and help are welcome.

In the table you can find our development plan of the technical parts of our website and what the status is for the different stages.

Accessibility

One of the issues we are working with is accessibility. We do that by trying to highlight the subject and also to help out with translations of recommendations in that area.

On first step is our 5 recommendations to a more accessible site. Also check out the W3C QuickTips for a more accessible website and the Getting Started: Making a Web Site Accessible . Thanks to Mr. Van Binh they are now also available in Vietnamese (W3C QuickTips and Getting Started).

To be on the W3C pages with a Vietnamese translation is a very important step to better awareness about Web Accessibility in Vietnam.

The important thing to understand is that making the Website more Accessible does not take a lot of effort. To make it completely accessible (if possible today) might but not the first steps. In fact, it will only make your Website better for everyone.