[Glastonbury] next meeting

[Ian Dickinson]

tim hall <tech at glastonburymusic.org.uk> wrote: 
>> In the end, phpWebSite won out, for two reasons
>> only:
>>
>> a) the output conforms to W3C standards (i.e. will
>> parse correctly); and
>> accessibility guidelines (both a must for this
>> application);
> That's almost shocking. You mean to say Plone and
> Mambo don't? 
You have to be a bit careful here about what
"conforms" means.  There have been a number of W3C
standard versions of HTML, from 1 through to 4.  Since
HTML 4.0, W3C has been pushing XHTML 1.0 as the main
version of HTML web designers should be using.

The main difference is that HTML is not strictly
conformant to the XML standard.  XML insists on a
number of syntactic rules, such as a strict tree-based
matching of opening and closing elements.  For
example, this would be valid HTML:

<p>one paragraph
<p><b>bold <i>bold italic</B></i>

But it breaks lots of XML rules, so to be XML
conformant it would have to be re-written:

<p>one paragraph</p>
<p><b>bold <i>italic</i></b></p>

In fact XHTHL goes further even than that, in that it
has removed some HTML presentation elements and
attributes. So that the XHTML document defines the
information structure and content, while the
presentation (font style, size, colour, background
colours, etc) is entirely managed through style
sheets.

Historically, browser engines like IE and Netscape
have been very tolerant of ill-formed HTML, and tried
to do the best they could.  This has, in fact,
explains some (but not all) of the reasons why the
same document can look wholly different in, for
example, IE and Mozilla.  This tolerance will remain
the case for a long time, since old, ill-formed web
content will stick around for years yet. But the W3C
is encouraging all designers to abide by the much
stricter XHTML rules (using a validator to check
conformance as necessary), so that content *should* be
presented consistently irrespective of the browser
platform.

Btw, to check that a page is valid XHTML there are
many tools available, and a free online checker at
http://validator.w3.org/

Beyond, XTHML, as Martin alluded to, there are further
rules about using markup in a way that assists
disabled users.  These rules now have the force of law
in the USA - there's a deadline (I forget when it is)
for certain classes of public information, e.g. on
corporate and government sites, to be conformant to
the rules for accessibility.

In my view, it should be a pretty important criterion
when selecting a CMS whether that tool generates good,
clean, standards-conformant XHTML.  Your site will
still be usable if the tool doesn't do that, but
you're saving yourself a whole bunch of future trouble
if it does.

Ian



		
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