[Glastonbury] next meeting

[tim hall]

Last Wednesday 01 December 2004 13:23, Ian Dickinson was like:
> 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.

Except users of IE5 and below (still a significant %) won't be able to view 
the site correctly.
Obviously people should just use Firefox (a growing %).
I think the accessibility arguments are important.

Durn, missed the meeting. :(

cheers

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk