Looks good, I wonder if I can get my work to pay for me to go?

He wanted a program that would take in multiple IP addresses and find out not only where in the world they were from, but also who the IP address belonged to, basically the ISP of these IP addresses. The interesting thing was that I was in a race with one of their programmers who had been working on the same thing since Monday and was several hours away from completing it. So I started work.

At about 12:00 today I had a fully working IP address to ISP lookup tool which I packaged up and sent off to them. The client said it was exactly what he was looking for and that the data that their programmer had come up with was only a fraction of the information that my tool displayed. It also allowed the user to export the data into a CSV file, which he thought was brilliant.

Paul (my company director) was very impressed (he even shook my hand) and it looks as though I have made the company a lot of money. But not only that, on a personal level I beat a lead developer in another company by at least 4 days to produce a fully working tool that was said to be impossible.

Sometimes I surprise even myself!

There are a number of waysto check the validation of a site. You can go to the W3C validation site and type in the address of the site you want to check. Or you can download and install the very excelent Firefox and the even more brilliant Web Developer Extension; the work of a guy called Chris Pederick. This toolbar allows you to click on a button and validate any site that you are looking at as well as a whole host of other really usefull things.

The site I was talking about above was Amazon.co.uk. As of the date if this article the front page on Amazon has 1160 errors. This is very, very poor, for a number of reasons.

I am of the opinion that compliance with web standards is essential in any web site or web based product. It ensures that the site is accessible to people and machines and that the site will function with the advent of new browsers. The second point is work based as it stops developers having to redesign their sites every time a new browser comes out. The first point, that of accessibility, should be at the forefront of every website developers mind as sites that are not accessible do not conform to the UK Disability Discrimination Act. Part three of this act refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, which specifically mentions websites. So if your site does not conform to at least level 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (which includes validation) you will in breach of the act and in danger of being fined or even sued.

The U.S.A. has an equivalent law called Section 508.

So my message to Amazon is this. I will continue to buy products from your site as I can’t fault your shop for it’s value and service. But please work towards validation! Having over a thousand errors on your site makes it look like you really don´t care.