Isaac Johnston wrote:
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
This is OK to me. I think HTML 4 would be better probably, as it's more
widely supported. Of course we could switch to XHTML easily when
Microsoft actually get their act together and support it correctly. I'll
post a screenshot soon of what I had planned for the homepage.
Also, I take it the new design (WAI and Javascript) would be
backend-independent? Currently I'm working on a new backend based on
Django in Python, and hopefully I won't have to change any of it :)
Thanks,
Alex
--
Alex Smith
Frugalware Linux developer - http://www.frugalware.org
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