What’s this about?
The Built Environment & Health (BEH) project is an interdisciplinary program of research at Columbia University. Led by epidemiologist Andrew Rundle, BEH uses spatial data to examine the implications of the built environment, including land use, public transit, and housing, for physical activity, diet, obesity, and other aspects of health. With a focus on New York City, BEH research will inform public policy to promote health in the city and metropolitan area. BEH is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia.
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Built Environment and Health Project Website
This page concerns the technical specifications and standards of the BEH website. If that’s not what you bargained for, perhaps you’re interested in learning about BEH more generally, or maybe you would like a down-to-earth overview of the accessibility features of our website.
Designed for Redesign
The BEH website is designed with an eye toward the future. Drawing on the lessons of experimental websites like Dave Shea’s css Zen Garden, BEH has 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 non-technical staff to make 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.
BEH’s 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 BEH website has been designed both to comply with the best current practices and to be interoperable with future technologies.
The BEH 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 BEH 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.
BEH’s news feed is valid and conforms to the RSS 2.0 Specification of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
We also take advantage of Google’s Sitemap Protocol to facilitate with the discovery, indexing, and triage of certain pages on our site.
While we have gone to lengths to ensure that content fed from BEH’s database maintains these standards, there is always a risk that down the line improperly formatted data entered into our content management system may inadvertently upset the validity or semantic structure of some pages.
Accessibility
The BEH website is designed to comply with the U.S. Federal Government 1998 Amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, as well as to 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.
Cookies
The BEH website uses cookies to preserve a user’s preferred style sheet from one visit to the next. No information about the user is collected or recorded, and the cookies expire automatically after 180 days. If the user chooses to return to the default style sheet, the cookie is deleted.
See our accessibility features for further details about alternate style sheets.
Browser Support
The BEH 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, 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 and 6.0 for Windows. Style sheets intended for these browsers are fed via conditional comments. Minor provisions have also been made to accommodate Internet Explorer for Macintosh.
Our handheld device format has been tested using a simulator of the Opera Mobile browser. The layout is designed for screens ranging from 120 pixels to 320 pixels wide, and we have provided a manual switch for users whose browsers do not automatically recognize the handheld style sheet. See our accessibility features for further details about viewing the BEH website on a handheld device.
Acknowledgements
The BEH website was completed in summer of 2006, and credit for goes to Kathyrn Neckerman and Gia Storms for overseeing the project.
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.
