The aims of the sociable contract
Aims
The principle aim of the contract is to commit the developer and the site owner to a set of principles that define the user experience.
The contract is transparent, and available both to the creators of the site, and those who use it.
It captures certain best practices but it does not specifiy how they should be achieved. For example, the development team could enforce performance targets by making new releases contingent on meeting criteria such as page size.
It is my intention to conform to the guiding principles for companies laid out by the Contract for the Web: Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone, so that no one is excluded from using and shaping the Web.
Aspirations
The articles on this site are hard-coded. That is reasonable for a personal site but if I were to use it as a starting point for another site, I would create custom widgets for layout elements that extend standard HTML. The most important reason for doing this is that the client becomes independent of the developer. This would allow for articles in other languages.
Language support
Websites do not support every language. The reasons for this vary but no site has all of its content available in every known language.
There is a difference, however, between not supporting a language, and precluding support for that language. This site appears only in English and whilst there is no demand for any of its articles to be translated, I would like that possibility to exist. Moreover, the construction of the site is intended to be replicated, or followed, in building other sites which may be require support for multiple languages.
This aspiration is contained in one of the principles for companies defined by the Contract for the Web (emphasis is mine):
Ensuring user interfaces and customer service are effective, and offered in languages and mediums that are accessible to minorities and people with disabilities, including by respecting universal acceptance principles.Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone