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This page concerns the technical specifications and standards of the Revson Fellowship website. If that’s not what you bargained for, perhaps you’re interested in learning about Revson more generally, or maybe you would like a down-to-earth overview of the accessibility features of our website.
Designed for Redesign
The Revson Fellowship website is designed with an eye toward the future. Drawing on the lessons of experimental websites like Dave Shea’s css Zen Garden, the Revson Fellowship has implemented a robust and versatile structure for its XHTML markup, with a flexible tagging system that is not tied to any one graphic design. The separation of content, structure, and presentation not only allows non-technical staff to make day-to-date updates to the site’s content, but allows developers to modify the existing templates and create new ones, and also allows designers to refine or restyle the entire site—each without impinging on the work of the other.
The Revson Fellowship’s website templates are valid XML documents, allowing for interaction and interoperability with advanced, up-and-coming technologies. The site is currently served to standards compliant user agents using the “application/xhtml+xml” media type, but may also be served as HTML in certain circumstances.
Technologies and Standards
Web standards help keep the Internet a common, democratic, and universally accessible space. With this ideal in mind, the Revson Fellowship website has been designed both to comply with the best current practices and to be interoperable with future technologies.
The Revson Fellowship website is marked up with valid, semantic XHTML 1.0 using the Strict DTD. To accommodate the limitations of legacy browsers and some popular browsing technologies, the documents may be served using the “text/html” media type to some user agents. Server-side PHP scripts compile the documents from modular components comprising navigational and graphical elements, as well as from content in our database.
The presentation of our content is described in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which are separate from the structural XHTML, allowing for complete overhaul of the site’s graphic design without altering the underlying templates. The CSS for the Revson Fellowship website is valid and conforms with the CSS 2.1 Specification. Techniques and hacks used in our cascading style sheets are credited within the documents.
The Revson Fellowship’s news feed is valid and conforms to the RSS 2.0 Specification of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
We also take advantage of Google’s Sitemap Protocol to facilitate with the discovery, indexing, and triage of certain pages on our site.
While we have gone to lengths to ensure that content fed from the Revson Fellowship’s database maintains these standards, there is always a risk that down the line improperly formatted data entered into our content management system may inadvertently upset the validity or semantic structure of some pages.
Accessibility
The Revson Fellowship website is designed to comply with the U.S. Federal Government 1998 Amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, as well as to Conformance Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommended by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. In some measure these standards are subjective, but we have reviewed the guidelines and believe that the templates of our website are in compliance. We have made every effort to meet Priority 3 checkpoints, as well, but given the subjective language of the specification, any claim to comply with Conformance Level AAA must be approached with healthy skepticism.
Cookies
The Revson Fellowship website uses cookies to preserve a user’s preferred style sheet from one visit to the next. No information about the user is collected or recorded, and the cookies expire automatically after 180 days. If the user chooses to return to the default style sheet, the cookie is deleted.
See our accessibility features for further details about alternate style sheets.
Browser Support
The Revson Fellowship website has been thoroughly tested on a variety of modern Internet browsers, but is designed to degrade gracefully on legacy browsers, as well. We have also conducted tests with the Lynx text browser and the VoiceOver screen reading application. While JavaScript enables us to provide a few, small enhancements to the experience and usability of our website, the site does not depend on JavaScript or any other client-side applications and plug-ins, nor even necessarily on support for CSS.
Internet browsers that are open source or built on open-source rendering engines are generally more responsive to the recommendations of standards bodies and to the ideals of an open, democratic web. Depending on your platform, various open-source user agents are available, including Camino, Flock, Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Shiira, OmniWeb, and Opera.
Measures have been taken nonetheless to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of widely used proprietary browsers such as Microsoft Corporations’s Internet Explorer 5.x, 6, and 7 for Windows. Style sheets intended for these browsers are fed via conditional comments. Minor provisions have also been made to accommodate Internet Explorer for Macintosh.
Our handheld device format has been tested using a simulator of the Opera Mobile browser. The layout is designed for screens ranging from 120 pixels to 320 pixels wide, and we have provided a manual switch for users whose browsers do not automatically recognize the handheld style sheet. See our accessibility features for further details about viewing the Revson Fellowship website on a handheld device.
Acknowledgements
The Revson Fellowship website was completed in autumn of 2006, and credit goes to Karen Vrotsos, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, and Emily Hawe for seeing the project through.
While standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) produce the specifications for valid, accessible web design and markup, the interpretation and application of these guidelines is ultimately worked through by a dynamic, online design community. We have found Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street, Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart, Andy Clarke’s And all that Malarkey, Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites, and Molly Holzschlag’s Web Standards Project to be invaluable resources.
Revson was a glorious, guiltless, officially sanctioned and supported year of immersion into lectures, good conversation, and the bottomless yield of Columbia’s impressive libraries. It made a gift of that most precious commodity of all: time. Nor could it have been delivered in better company or in more congenial surroundings. We ate together, talked endlessly, traded on our elevated status to bug professors for tutorials, and forged friendships that endure to this day.
