I'm attempting to use https://www.landlordregistrationscotland.gov.uk

First thing that struck me was the very low contrast on the three main
boxes (especially the left, pink one) - but then when I tried to find a
link to follow, the mouse pointer steadfastly refused to signal
anything.

I eventually found that clicking when hovering over the word "more" does
in fact take me to another page, but there's no hint to a visual user
that this is the case.

Looking at it in Lynx is even worse - what on earth are those three
links all called "A |" about? Not too keen on the use of the word
"Home" as the site title either, though as this is a site about housing
I suppose it could be argued as being appropriate! :-)

I can't validate it though I'm not sure if that's because it's defective
or the validator is - it tells me "this page is not supported". Anyone
able to shed more light?

Looking at the source code seems more heat than light, but presumably
it's from some kind of CMS or site generator, rather than an actual
author.

The lynx output looks like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Home
(p1 of 3)

Click here to skip to body of page Click here to learn more about
the
accessibility features of this site. Click here return to our home
page
Landlord Registration
* Home
* Search
+ Public Searches

* A |
* A |
* A |
* Accessibility |
* Help

Welcome to the Landlord Registration central online system for Scotland

Through this website, landlords and agents can apply for registration
with
all local authorities in Scotland, track their applications and
inform
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts?


PS: Update - the actual registration page are unusable in Firefox, the
text overlaps other text in an unreadable mess.

Should a brand new site who's source code is liberally sprinkled with
the word "accessibility" really be this hard to use?

Presumably it'll work in IE... ...oh look, it displays perfectly.

<sigh>

--
- DJ Pyromancer, The Sunday Goth Social, Leeds. <http://www.sheepish.net>

Broadband, Dialup, Domains = <http://www.wytches.net> = The UK's Pagan ISP!
<http://www.inkubus-sukkubus.co.uk> <http://www.revival.stormshadow.com>

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:00:54 +0000, Pyromancer
<pyromancer@beeching.stormshadow.com> wrote in
<iCvnS6SWAeGEFw$d@nemesis.as15758.net>:

If you look *very* carefully you may just be able to detect that the
'A's are different sizes. When the telepathic communication with the
site designer kicks in (or you read the source) you realise that these
are links to copies of the site in different font sizes.

The W3C validator says:

Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because its content type is
https://www.landlordregistrationscot...d=showhomepage,
which is not currently supported by this service.

My Firefox seems to think the Content-type is text/html.

It seems that the server is misconfigured in a very strange way! Perhaps
it has some bogus user agent detection going on.

--
Owen Rees
[one of] my preferred email address[es] and more stuff can be
found at <http://www.users.waitrose.com/~owenrees/index.html>

In article <pcel129k4dv9v3vlsqm2nk37ba9nmlrnrn@4ax.com>, Owen Rees wrote:
It looks like possibly a combination of a bad site and a bug in the
validator. The site is [sometimes] not sending a Content-Type header,
and it looks like that's confusing the validator.

In case you're curious, no the site doesn't validate. The pages don't
even have a DOCTYPE (they appear to be a mixture of XHTML and HTML),
let alone get anywhere near to validating against one.