I wrote to a site owner last week and I thought I was writing to a webmaster. The site owner complained about some of the jargon and, while explaining who I thought I was writing for, I explained some of it because I think more website owners might benefit from these three explanations:-
“Expat-like terms” – made available in a way that is freely sharable, modifiable and redistributable, similar to the Expat software package, whose terms are published at http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt – this is often used as a clear, simple example for encouraging wide distribution of electronic resources (software).
“clandestine Google Analytics” – Google Analytics is a service from Google, Inc for tracking users through a website in various ways. I believe the Data Protection Act means that English websites should obtain informed consent from users by publishing a Privacy Policy on their site which discloses what the GA service will be used for and linking through to GA’s own Privacy Policy. Some websites attempt to run Google Analytics on users’ computers without explaining why and without any Privacy Policy. That is what I mean by “clandestine”.
“valid xhtml” – validating against the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the underlying language of the web. There is a test service provided at http://validator.w3.org/ and passing it is a key stepping stone towards making an accessible website. There’s not really such a thing as “invalid xhtml” – if it doesn’t pass validation, it’s not xhtml. So I guess I’m guilty of using a tautology sometimes – sorry about that.
Is it worthwhile knowing those three phrases? Are there other key technical phrases which you think site owners should know?
9 comments so far
1 ef // Nov 13, 2008 at 1:54 pm
agree to #3 but a major WTF? to #1 and #2
Being a webmaste in the admin sense I couldn’t care less about Google Analytics.
And I still haven’t grasped what you mean with #3.
Actually in 10 years of creating webpages I’ve never come across that term.
2 ef // Nov 13, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Oh, and if you require an email address and your form eats replies if you fail to provide one.. please denot that with a (* required) or something, please…
3 MJ Ray // Nov 13, 2008 at 5:15 pm
@ef – no, the site doesn’t require an email address, but it seems some pages aren’t displaying the “thanks – your comment will appear after it is reviewed” message I was expecting. I’ll look into that Real Soon Now.
Well, I think you should care about whether your site is maybe-illegally tracking visitors, and if you’ve never come across xhtml or validation, I don’t think I’d trust you to approve a website. Sorry.
4 JohnB // Nov 13, 2008 at 8:00 pm
#1 – I am not so sure about this, really. I have to be a bit careful I always tell my people – watch you copyright materials. And few web site owners would be interested in what “Expat” actually meant – copyleft would be more appropriate – with suitable explanation.
Yep, as far as #2 and #3 are concerned.
Google are worrying for exactly that reason, I always hesitate to add GA to my people’s sites: not understanding the legal implications of some of this stuff will lead us down the road of litigation one day. Like the “pseudo-law” that comes into play when you register a domain “Inclusion on the whois database” – I cannot even get a solicitor to give me a straight answer on that one, i.e. what constitutes a “Non-trading individual” perfectly plain to me but not, it would appear to a solicitor.
#3 – I think if a “World Wide” web consortium lay down rules, then by all means use them (“World Wide” web browser manufacturers should conform too! ooops sorry IE6, 7, and 8 (and IE9?) users).
5 Steve Parker // Nov 14, 2008 at 2:04 am
(1) I must say that I don’t think that I have heard of the “Thai Open Source Software Center”, which is apparently behind this. The format of the boilerplate looks familiar, but I would not recognise that term.
(2) I wouldn’t call the use of Google Analytics “clandestine”; however, if you are using a web browser with cookies and javascript enabled, then *your* software is providing that information (unrequested) to *my* server, for me to do with as I see fit.
(3) Valid (x)HTML is good to have. I would also expect any webmaster to know what it means. Many (most?) websites fail on some part, still… “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept” created that whole mess in the 1990s, so we would appear to be stuck with being “liberal” in accepting non-compliant (x)HTML
6 Yaroslav Halchenko // Nov 14, 2008 at 5:18 am
“clandestine Google Analytics” is a good one — I should put on mine that I am free of it
GA is a really handy gadget for a webmaster but is evil since it empowers a single company (pretty much) to discover too much of your own, some times “clandestine” habbits… thus NoScript is running, and GA is not in the list of allowed
Some person I know got really surprised whenever I told her that regular Google search is a user-specific, ie result is sorted accordingly to the user ‘habbits’… she got more suprized when I proved her that google knows more about her ‘habits’ outside of simple searches, thanks to GA
7 MJ Ray // Nov 14, 2008 at 11:37 am
(1) – I thought Expat-like originated from Jim Clark (see URL) and I’ve not heard of the “Thai Open Source Software Center” either. Part of the point is that it’s short and liberal – I don’t usually care much about whether it’s copyleft or not. A fringe benefit is that Expat is for processing XML, which some webmasters will have seen.
(2) – @Steve Parker – the browser only provides cookies back to your server if you instruct it to – it’s not unrequested. The Information Commissioner is pretty clear about this. From Guidance on the Privacy and Electronic
Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, Part 2:
“Cookies or similar devices must not be used unless the subscriber or user of the relevant terminal equipment:
• is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and
• is given the opportunity to refuse the storage of, or access to, that information.”
8 Steve Parker // Nov 14, 2008 at 3:49 pm
you’re right; “unrequested” is the wrong word. I would think that anyone sufficiently savvy to be concerned about cookies would also be capable of disabling cookies and/or javascript, using NoScript, etc. Browsers are pretty good these days at protecting user privacy, and virtually all websites will run fine without third-party cookies (eg GA) though a depressingly large number do require local cookies for so-called authentication
9 ef // Nov 17, 2008 at 7:00 pm
meh, s/what you mean with #3./what you mean with #1/
“expat-like terms” – now I finally got why I missed the point.
As a non-native speaker I read it as “terms as used with expat (piece of software) – not legal terms. Doh.
And this brings me to the point of country-specific laws as this legal mumbo jumbo is – to my knowledge – completely unneeded depending where you’re having your business.
And it was also based on your phrasing of the Google Analytics thingy, why not just say something about privacy and customer tracking without this GA example that totally confused me?
But again, the customer protection laws are very different in each country.
But as I said, I completely agree on #3