RMS Caronia Timeline
Accessibility & Standards
Validation Guide
Cunard's 'Green Goddess'
Luxurious world ocean travel aboard a famous British cruise liner
Introduction
This page is only intended as guidance for site evaluators who may be wondering how they might continue their work without falling foul of my bad-robots trap. This is a shared desire! Unfortunately, most link-checkers do not follow the “robots.txt” exclusion standard, so they cannot easily be steered away.
If you decide to ignore my request to not use these tools, your link checker will either be barred entirely with Error 403, or it will trigger the rogue robot trap that will bar you from the site!
When I receive, and can respond to, the email notification of this trigger, I will now email you to ask for a full explanation before access is restored! I'm very reluctantly forced to do this because despite my request not to do so, some award evaluators are still attempting to run software such as Xenu here.
Another reason for this block is that, with well over 700 pages and 5,000 images, the Timeline is now far too large for any link-checker to perform without time-outs within the 60 seconds script time-limit imposed by my site-hosts.
With Xenu, I had to provide complex instructions so that it could run without completely gumming-up my hosts' server. They were also needed to prevent around 1,400 recursive calls (approx 200 a minute) to validate the very same CSS file. The list goes on...
I apologise if all this causes you any inconvenience, however the security and availability of the Timeline for all legitimate users to enjoy has to be given the highest priority. Please recognise that I also find it very regrettable that I need to have such preventive measures in place.
Validation Tool Alternatives
There are alternatives to using the validation tools outlined above. For example, you can easily validate the CSS by clicking this CSS link, or on any placed at the bottom of every page. The XHTML can be verified by clicking on adjacent links on any page. WCAG/WAI validation can be safely done by using the HiSoftware / Cynthia Says site. If you happen to find any page that doesn't validate, I'd welcome your advice of this. Thanks.
Using the site search engine will show the close attention that has been paid to use of title and description meta tags which these pages rely on, including the automatic building of title tool-tips. Work is continuing on adopting the Dublin Core meta tags for most index pages.
Having stated all this, please be assured that I constantly check the integrity of the Timeline as a matter of principle. With an in-house search engine installed, links are now checked every time that I re-index. These occur far more frequently than when I used Xenu. Any real errors that are found are corrected just as soon as they are spotted, or when an automatic notifying email is received here.
Other Validation Issues
In excess of 2,700 popup windows are generated from thumbnail images on the Timeline. The way these are coded may show, on certain on-line validators, that many pages do not pass their automated test for WCAG Level 2 requirements.
However, manual verification will show that the coding does allow for a fail-safe on these image popups. Hitherto it passed their automatic tests but, unless JavaScript was enabled, access to the larger images was completely barred. If the suggested commands that would make pages pass those validators were added, they would entirely disrupt keyboard use of some modern (accessible) browsers.
Equally, anchors placed for movies that were shown twice on separate days of the same month will also unavoidably fail the automatic Level 2 tests. Removing these however, would disrupt a user-recognised page functionality.
WCAG 2.0 Guidelines
Please note that under the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, there is no longer a need to provide access keys or any textual breaks between adjacent hyperlinks. Because this site required well in excess of 3,500 of the latter, their existence had quite an impact on bandwidth, so they have been removed. If you do verify this site for accessibility, do please bear this in mind. Thanks.
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Version 1.4