G'day Peter Thanks a lot for your comments. It's hard to find anyone who'll talk bluntly to you when you work alone like I do.
You caught me being insufficiently careful with my language. But my point was at this stage, does it really matter that much if there's a part of the site that's not totally accessible, compliant, and syntactically correct? Yes, that's the goal, but if the effort/time required to get the last 10% of the way is huge, perhaps a slightly lesser level of rigor is the way to go, if it gets the job done, the site launched, and the client happy. Despite not stating things correctly, I think I made my point. As to my editor (SPAW-CF) ... it's on a probono site, so I have no budget at all for anything, including editors. It's open licence, so that's partly why I used it in the first place. I'm talking to the guy who wrote it about making it produce the proper code, and I don't think it's a gigantic job. (although on the other hand its not trivial either). It took me ages to get it to work, while I had to learn about CFCs and other stuff, and I don't really want to throw that away for another editor that may or may not be better. The SoEditor for example that runs on my own company's site also changes all tags to upper case, and I can't see where I can change that. I fear I could spend ages changing to another editor only to be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. And besides, I'm running a one-man business, searching for work, its first week of the month, I have a gazillion other things to do. I want to go XHTML because I found when I did, it forced me to be a LOT more vigorous in tidying up code and that also meant cleaning up the logic too. The end result of the sites I've converted to XHTML is a FAR better site. SO that's what I started out with here too. IF I find I can't get to XHTML in a reasonable time, I'll loosen the Doctype. I realise that html4.01 is an acceptable choice too, but I'm trying to force a lot of stuff into my brain at once. XHTML forces me to simplify the html code, so I can concentrate on learning to manipulate the CSS. I think if I was working simulataneously on sites of different doctypes, I'd end up confusing myself more than learning. Some things would work fine on one site and not on another. Does that make sense or am I being a woolly-thinker as usual? Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -----Original Message----- From: Peter Firminger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 5 March 2004 6:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WSG] turning back to the dark side... Hi Mike, Just a few things that need clearing up... > Why not just relax a little and do a table for the part > that's giving you > all the heartburn, and move on the rest of the site as > compliant. The html > wont validate, but will that really matter that much? <snip> > That way you're still getting most of the advantages of a > compliant site, > without being truly compliant. Using tables for layout is semantically incorrect, however it should still validate as it would if you were using them for a table of data. If it doesn't then you need to work out why and fix it. What are the errors you are referring to here? > I've taken this approach with a site I have where the WYSIWYG > editor I use > wont produce XHTML valid code - it will always change tags to > upper case and > changes <br /> to <BR> So since the pages are generated > dynamically they > can never validate. So I've just taken a snapshot of a few > of the pages, > saved them as html pages, manually changed the upper case > tags etc, then > checked that for validity. I know that the rest of the page > validates ok so > I'm just going to go with that. One day the WYSISYG editor > (SPAW-CF by the > way) will produce XHTML compliant code and then I'll have a > fully compliant > site. You really need to get a different editor! I suggest the Ektron ones as the best (OABB) and highly configurable. However I'm surprised that SPAW is writing code in this 1994 method. Then again development on SPAW seems to have come to a grinding halt. Not surprising really given the much better commercial products that are available. They are reinventing the wheel here. It brings me to ask why you would want to use XHTML if you use an embedded editor that doesn't write well formed code. HTML 4.01 is perfectly acceptable as a mark-up language. Using a hammer to put a wood screw in a piece of steel I feel ;-) P ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
