Recently launched: Kungälvs kommun

Last week, the new site for the Swedish municipality of Kungälv went live. It is, to my knowledge, the first fully web standards compliant municipal website in Sweden. We (myself and the rest of the team at NetRelations) did have to do quite a bit of tweaking to get there though. The CMS used has relatively decent default templates, but they do need some adjusting, so we ended up completely rebuilding most templates from scratch. Since the CMS is based on ASP.NET, there were other issues that needed to be taken care of as well, in order to make validation possible.

After some initial struggling, the site is now valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and we’re hoping it will stay valid. Most of the site would pass validation against a strict DOCTYPE, but we chose to stick with Transitional for the time being. For those of you who understand Swedish, there are some more details of the project in Ny webbplats för Kungälvs kommun.

Posted on October 6, 2004 in Quicklinks

Comments

  1. October 7, 2004 by Jens

    Amazing work. Are the people at the municipal aware of webstandards yet as there has been so much talk about the “24 hour goverment”? Do they have any requirements when developing new websites?

  2. October 7, 2004 by Kal Ström

    orebro.se validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional since its relaunched last month. So it’s not the first.

    orebro.se is still table-built, so you’re leg up there, but it does validate.

  3. October 7, 2004 by Kal Ström

    Jens: Well, Vägledningen för 24-timmarswebben is a guideline, but there is no law making governmental organizations to follow it. Yet.

  4. October 7, 2004 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    Kal: Sure, it validates, but as you noted it uses tables for layout (nested even), and suffers from divitis and classitis, spacer gifs, font tags and presentational markup.

    That’s why I wouldn’t call it fully web standards compliant. Nice to see valid HTML though :)

    Vägledningen 24-timmarswebben 2.0 is a great document. AFAIK there is no Swedish law that mandates it yet, but there is an Opinion of the Economic and Social Committee of the European Union. More info on EU laws and accessibility is available at WebAIM.

    I’ve been told that there is an EU Directive that requires public sector websites to be fully accessible. Anyone know more about that?

  5. October 7, 2004 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    Jens: Thanks :) And yes, the people at the municipality of Kungälv have adopted the technical guidelines specified by the “24 hour government”. It was in their requirements even before we got the job, so there was no need for us to convince them of the benefits of doing so.

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