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This page concerns the technical specifications and standards of the Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects website. If that’s not what you bargained for, perhaps you’re interested in learning about the Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects more generally, or maybe you would like a down-to-earth overview of the accessibility features of our website.
Designed for Redesign
The Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects website is designed with an eye toward the future. Drawing on the lessons of experimental websites like Dave Shea’s css Zen Garden, we have 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 for straightforward 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 Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects’ 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 Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects website has been designed both to comply with the best current practices and to be interoperable with future technologies.
The Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects 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 Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects 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.
We also take advantage of Google’s Sitemap Protocol to facilitate with the discovery, indexing, and triage of certain pages on our site.
Accessibility
The Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects website is designed to comply with 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.
Browser Support
The Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects 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.
Acknowledgements
The The Tuncer Çakmaklı Architects website was completed in winter of 2007-2008 by Jonathan Phillips with collaborators Tuncer Çakmaklı, Aziz Safi, Hakan Karaman, Kaan Karaali, and Merve Yalvaç.
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.
