Hi everybody, Firstly to those who have not met me on IRC I'm Isaac Johnston - a full-time web application developer from New Zealand who recently started using frugalware. Today marks one week since I installed it, and I have been using it as my main system since. Having had quite a bit of experience with Redhat, Ubuntu, Debian, Crux and FreeBSD over the years I am extremely impressed at the quality of this distribution.
Re some discussions on IRC I would like to do a rewrite of the frontend (markup, styles and if required javascript) of the home page in HTML4 strict. This opportunity could be used to implement AlexExtremes revamped design and increase accessibility for people with disabilities. Some reasons for this are dumped below - mostly I've copied the more important points from most of the links mentioned so you only really need to visit them if you want more information. 1: Strict vs. Transitional doctype Current: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd";> Proposed: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd";> This is the most important point of all - a strict document type is the foundation for quality markup and forces the separation of presentation from content. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html "This is HTML 4.01 Strict DTD, which excludes the presentation attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as support for style sheets matures. Authors should use the Strict DTD when possible, but may use the Transitional DTD when support for presentation attribute and elements is required." http://wellstyled.com/singlelang.php?lang=en&page=html-doctype-and-browser-mode.html A strict doctype will ensure your page is rendered in "standards compliance" rather than "quirks" mode which has a significant effect on how the page is displayed. http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/tommy-olsson.cfm "most people overestimate the benefits of XHTML, at the same time as they underestimate the benefits of using a Strict DTD. In my opinion, using a Strict DTD, either HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict, is far more important for the quality of the future web than whether or not there is an X in front of the name. The Strict DTD promotes a separation of structure and presentation, which makes a site so much easier to maintain. You can re-style a site completely by updating a single CSS file, rather than making identical changes to 10,000 pages with presentational markup. It also has lots of benefits for the user (quicker download) and the server (less bandwidth), as well as for search engines (better content-to-markup ratio). Last but not least, it makes it a lot easier to create an accessible site. The main cause of confusion seems to be that many web authors think that HTML must be written as 'tag soup.' The truth is that you can - and should! - write HTML 4.01 that is almost identical to XHTML 1.0. Just because HTML allows some shortcuts doesn't mean that you should use them." http://www.thepickards.co.uk/index.php/200609/its-time-to-kill-off-transitional-doctypes/ http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=23#n23 2: XHTML vs. HTML and media types. Current: What looks like valid XHTML 1 is actually being served as invalid HTML due to an incorrect media type. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ /opt/bin/furl frugalware.org HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:05:38 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.5 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=b0c8eac2eac22f09490951cc32fc5801; path=/ Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Proposed: HTML4 served as text/html. http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml "If you use XHTML, you should deliver it with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. If you do not do so, you should use HTML4 instead of XHTML." http://www.elementary-group-standards.com/html/why-xhtml.html "- XHTML 1.0 is not forward compatible; XHTML 2.0 will not be backwards compatible. - Serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml does't work in IE. - HTML 5 purports backwards compatibility." Although there are other more subtle reasons from this alone I would conclude that, although I agree XHTML would still "work", HTML4 would be the best choice. 3: Accessibility / WAI Current: arguably the absolute minimum for WAI priority one. Proposed: ? This is such a broad subject I will simply direct you to some great articles if your interested. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/wiwa/ http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/06/14/why-accessibility/ and of course... http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ This email is already long enough so I shall leave it at that. At the very least this should get some conversation on the topic going ;) Cheers Isaac _______________________________________________ Frugalware-devel mailing list [email protected] http://frugalware.org/mailman/listinfo/frugalware-devel
