Tim, were you really asked for a "Web 2.0 compliant site"?
Its "Web 2.0" and its a load of shite!!! The next customer that asks me if the solution we are putting in is compliant with it will die !!
If the client indeed asked for this, although sending them to an early and violent death would be straight from the appendix section of the Developers Handbook, it's best to check that they haven't fallen to the daftness of the most recent buzzword before their untimely end. We can't after all sentence them all to death for not quite having the ability to express their needs.
I've been asked for a Web2.0 compliant site but I couldn't bring myself to condemn them for not being appreciative of the nuances of my profession. I hope I haven't misinterpreted your comments but it I suspect that there is some confusion as to what exactly Web2.0 and Standards Compliance is.
Web 2.0, the buzzword applies mainly to the participatory aspect of the web along with a re-hash of existing scripting languages into a new fandango term AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript and xHTML); no relation to a cleaning product. I completely agree that some aspects of Web 2.0 need a good splash of the real Ajax. It's just something that some boffins came up with to get investors back after the burst and the proliferation of jazzy objects thrown in for the sake of it simply clutters everything. In essence, Web2.0 has nothing to do with how links work.
Still, the benefits of the 'rebirth' are many; that we can Google, oogle, dig, twit, flikr, dikr and spacebook on myface (plus other seed-funded intelligence agency data mining programs) and blether on a Blog; that's the participation. Here we are 'doing it' on an open source phpBB (PHP has been around for a while but Open Source exploded with Web 2.0 and it's all the better for it) - generally one of the better aspects of Web 2.0 is our ability to interact almost instantaneously.
What I suspect clients are asking for is that the site be Standards Compliant.
It is a set of wooley standards that seem to change daily so that whatever you design and build today wont be compliant tomorrow.
Not so chap, indeed the opposite is true.
Standards Compliance is a good, smart, efficient and actually a requirement for public sector projects (as well as developer/agency/corporate work). 'Wooly' is certainly isn't and writing to the W3C guidelines using standards compliant code WILL yield a great degree of future-proofing and consistency in newer browsers, improve efficiency, reduce bandwidth and be superbly cost effective in development and maintain. The W3C guidelines are not about to change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards
I had to work on a site that was built eight years ago (the client simply didn't want to convert to a cleaner more search engine friendly, accessible, low bandwidth code) and it took me four times as long as usual to make some simple changes , some of which I'd not even try (i.e. when the site is 1000 pages plus). Looking at my own prehistoric pre-standards code, I literally shudder, and now that you mention it, the code looks wooly!
Tim, just in case you're asked this again (again, assuming I have understood you correctly), ask what the client means by Compliance and why it is a requirement. It's likely that the response will point to Standards Compliance, not Web2.0.
If they still insist on a "Web 2.0" compliant site, I'll help with disposal
When you are typing a reply you used to be able to browse away to check something elsewhere and then go back to where you were using Back and your typing would still be there, not it says the page has expired and you have to start again. If i reember, i copy before i browse away so i can paste but it is a niggle.
The above symptoms are indicative of the forms not coded to retain their inputted values (including the wiping thereof following a form validation error) and setting the expiry too short means that the site hasn't been user tested to establish what the maximum expiry allowance should be. Hundreds of other causes besides, few of them will actually be a fault of the browser (unless it is IE v6.0.2800, which is simply monumentally awful! :mad2 )
By the way Timbo, are you the Oxford based former long haired rocker singer named Messer?
Regards all.
