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Do not style HTML selectors!

One of the biggest problems I face when trying to construct a maintainable web standards compliant web site is that the site often ends up being only either maintainable or compliant. The reason why it?s problematic is because web standard web sites require knowledge of many facets and disciplines from its operators. Take the average CMS user for example, the run of the mill corporate web editor. This is usually a part-time position that someone got shafted with because they spilt coffee on the boss. They?re not going to give a hoot about compliancy.

2005-10-09 / 10:21

6 Comments

By Mark Wubben
10/10/2005 12:28 PM
Enschede, the Netherlands
I believe Xopus from Q42 does create valid data. If I'm not mistaken it's even validated against the DTD.
By Egor Kloos
10/10/2005 12:49 PM
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Europe, Earth etc...
Can't do a full test on the output, so it's imposible to judge. Sadly it's a Windows and IE only affair, that can be a bit problematic. I encounter more and more clients that require a CMS to work on another plaform like Linux or just on another browser. Many of our Museum clients use Macs for example. Also goverments are looking at open source and alternate platforms.
It's quite a serious trade off to consider. Sometimes I will need to let a little W3C compliance slide in favor of user requirements like optional platforms and browsers.
By Meint
10/10/2005 09:03 PM
Have a look at either XStandard, www.xstandard.com or the BXE Editor, http://www.bitfluxeditor.org/

They're wysiwyg and standards compliant without upsetting content editors
By Egor Kloos
10/11/2005 12:07 AM
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Europe, Earth etc...
Well basically, the tools I mentioned are also prettry compliant but are not consistant which in turn results in non compliant code because they're placed in a static template.

BXE editor didn't impress me that much. xstandard seem to fair a bit better despite it being platform dependant.

So in fact if I stick to my technique I can get pretty good code (well close enough) with the tools I already mentioned.

The Q42 solution does appeal to me more than the others because its very easy to use and is still rigid so that the developers can't control the output better. Simlilar solutions seem to be possible with up coming versions of Opera and Safari (haven't checked the mozilla roadmap yet, it's a bit late ;)
Transformations are a bit tricky to handle and can get very unwieldy very quickly. But the solution feels like they're on the right track.
By Mark Wubben
10/15/2005 01:23 AM
Enschede, NL
Okay, Anne corrected me [1]: Xopus doesn't validate against a DTD, but it does validate the markup.

[1]: http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/10/work
By Patrick Klaassen
10/17/2005 10:35 AM
Heemstede, NL
Xopus does validate based on the document's schema. To support the user they even use prevalidation. Actions that would render the document invalid are disabled by this feature.
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