Government Web Standards & Recommendations

I meant to blog about this a few weeks back, but I forgot.

The New Zealand government has recently released the NZ Government Web Standards and Recommendations v1.0.

This document covers mark-up (HTML, XHTML, CSS), content, page layout, security, you-name-it; the whole gamut of site design and development.

The standards and guidelines apply to any web site that is intended for the public and financed by the public through the crown or through public agencies; the recommendations become mandatory on 1 January 2008.

I’ve had a quick skim, and it looks to be quite reasonable and solid. Some of the requirements would impact design such that I wouldn’t personally hold to them all when building sites myself (unless it was for the government, of course), but this is a great document to refer to when building a site.