Peter-Paul Koch highlights the new Dutch government guidelines for websites, which will make web professionals involved with web standards smile (it certainly made an impression on me!). By Dutch law, government websites are required to use:
- valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0
- CSS and semantic HTML and separation of structure and presentation
- progressive enhancement
- the W3C DOM (instead of the old Microsoft document.all)
- meaningful values of class and id
- meaningful alt attributes on all images
Unfortunately, the regulations are only in Dutch, there is no English translation available yet.
