Legal Writing

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Here’s the disclaimer you need to accept to enter Morrison & Foerster’s Privacy Library:

Note that two graphic images that belong in the right sidebar aren’t where they belong. They’re obscuring part of the disclaimer.

Now, here’s how that same disclaimer looks to the people at Morrison & Foerster:

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At most firms, all the attorneys and all the administrators and all the staff use the same computers running the same operating system and the same Internet browser. Everything looks the same to them.

But visitors who might want to access the library aren’t all using the same hardware and software as the folks at MoFo. They’re using older versions of the operating system. They’re using different browsers. They’re using Macs, or iPhones, or BlackBerries.

And they’re finding some things at MoFo’s site out of whack.

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What to do?

When you create or revise a Web site, you could go and test it with all sorts of different combinations of device, operating system, and browser. But that wouldn’t be terribly efficient. Nor would it guarantee that the site will continue to appear correctly to those who start using a new device or operating system or browser.

Here’s what to do when you publish a site, or whenever you revise it:

Validate It.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a Markup Validation Service you can use to make sure your site produces valid output. In other words, you can use it to make sure your site looks OK to all the rest of the world.

Just feed the URL of your site to the validator (it’s free) and see if there are any errors. If there are, fix them.

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Note: At the time this was posted, the validator reported 40 errors at MoFo’s Privacy Library, including a variety of margin errors.

Full post as published by Set in Style on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).