> Hi Faruk, > > Another way to look at this is - there must be something fundamentally > wrong with the CMS if it generates bad markup and relies on clean-up tools > to fix the markup. > > Regards, > -Vlad
In a perfect world, yes. But as there currently is no WYSIWYG editor that works on all platforms and that ensures valid and well-formed XHTML on its own, this is a dream concept that is not feasible in the real world as it is, today. If you give your users the freedom to use some level of formatting (which in a good CMS, you have to), there's a chance that they'll submit invalid markup. "Relying" on a clean-up tool is not a matter of doing things "fundamentally wrong", it's a matter of doing things solidly correct. There is no single reliable cross-platform WYSIWYG editor that also works as a "clean-up tool", and thus you simply HAVE to resort to them, or write them yourself. Until there is a good set of WYSIWYG editors that are flawless in that they produce and *guarantee* (important!) well-formed, valid markup, there is an inevitable need for something like Tidy. Again, that's not being fundamentally wrong, it's making sure that your customers can input their data without severe limitations, AND without breaking the site. > Editize is a Java applet, and requires that you install Java in your > browser. > It works in all browsers that can handle Java 1.3+, even IE4. > As Java is cross-platform, Editize also is. > > But this means it's not a HTML-based authoring front end. > > I don't think this is a possible way to go with regards to ATAG/WCAG. > Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. > > Unfortunately I can't find any information on accessibility on the > Editize site. > Editize is said to create compliant HTML4, but not XHTML for now. I use Editize in my CMS, and it works quite well. There's a few "hidden configuration" settings that allow you to put Editize into XHTML mode. It isn't the best there is, but right now, it's definitely very decent compared to the rest. The only thing Editize can't really deal well with is cleaning up pasted content that contains (invalid) (X)HTML markup that it doesn't natively support. In short, if you copy-paste a large XHTML document into it, DIV and FORM elements (for instance) will be pasted along, but those can't be dealt with properly by Editize itself. Hence comes the need for Tidy (or something similar) to make sure it's correct, valid, well-formed XHTML. Or HTML, if you want that. Editize as an applet lacks a few things that are useful for creating truly accessible websites (for instance, it strips out <span> tags), but on the whole, it's a pretty good editor. Regards, Faruk Ates http://kurafire.net/ - Standards blog, design, typography, more ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *********************************************************
