> -----Original Message----- > From: Amit Karmakar > > When we say CMS we mean Content Management, well in a nut shell > managing the content, publishing etc. Content Management and > Validation of code are 2 different things. > What does the group think? >
I think the boundaries are slightly blurred in this area. It's true that CMSs and Code validation are separate in many products. If a CMS was to enforce code validation it would loose acceptance and market share in the quirks mode market. So most CMSs wisely have these features as add in modules, plugins, macros, whatever, which facilitates both market needs. These tools are not so much a requirement for the developers sake, as most standards based developers can easily build templates that will validate. The problem comes in with users adding content via whatever means the CMS facilitates this, and having backend tools to clean this up to meet standards based QA. The minute you have users adding content, and you want to address W3C standards and web accessibility, the ATAG guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10/ & http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10-TECHS/) come into play. These guidelines are meant to address any type of authoring of web sites, including any form with a textarea for posting content. If you read these guidelines and have a problem with them in the context of web based authoring, I share your dilemma, because there are issues here that need to be addressed in ATAG2 to better serve all areas of web authoring (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au/2004JanMar/0104.html). It's very difficult, almost impossible to comply with ATAG when deploying web based authoring interfaces, but the development community has addressed this issue to a large degree to make our life easier with the backend tools to address these requirements. Any front end or backend system that allows users to manage content is by definition an authoring tool, and if you want to maintain the standards integrity of your site then you need to check and make sure that all authoring input is parsed, checked, corrected and validated before publishing it, otherwise non valid markup can enter your system and your page is no longer valid. Of course this is not much of a problem if you don't really care about standards compliant markup. MT, TextPattern, Drupal, Plone, Cocoon, etc all have modules to manage this requirement. But still it is no guarantee to maintain the sites standards compliance when you hand it over to the client. If they are allowed access to the engine or templates, then the QA standards compliance component of the deliverable is then void (at least that's how I work, cause if you don't state this clearly, they will come back at you for delivering a faulty publishing system). But as far as most of the commercial offerings, like Interwoven Teamsite, Documentum, etc are concerned, I don't think they address this issue at all, I could be wrong, I don't know them that well, but I have used them briefly and didn't see anything to address these issues. Geoff ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
