Does anyone know if DNN will be making moves towards W3C compliance in the markup it generates?

Presently if you try to validate a DNN portal with just the default skins it will fail both HTML and CSS validation. Seems to be a lot of issues in the naming structure of controls as they are placed on the page.

My clients are starting to become aware of W3C and want pure CSS designs. When they can test their site and see that it fails validation - it becomes an issue for me.

---

Will Ballard
Ingen Systems

Doing a CSS based skin is not the problem (although I appreciate the reply post).

The issue is - does the core plan on doing what it takes to get DNN to validate? Is it even possible with ASP.net (I know this answer is "Yes").

For me there have been problems in the past that have almost forced me to move away from DNN. One of those was poor Mac compatibility with SolPart - a problem I resolved with ComponentArts menu. I could not sell a  DNN site to my clients if their site didn't work on Macs.

This is becoming just such an issue. Clients are getting smarter and some of mine can even click to plugins for Firefox and see if their site validates. If the HTML is not even valid HTML - it becomes a real sticking point for a truly savvy client.

Market forces will dictate that DNN move to W3C compliant markup. IE7 is on the way and that's going to continue to force the issue of web standards.

Don't get me wrong guys - I'm a huge DNN fan down here in Dallas. We're actually starting to (slowly) build a business on the technology and I just think it's great and appreciate the hard work the Core does.

I guess my question (or diatribe) is "Does the core team acknowledge and have a plan to address W3C standards compliance?"

---

Will Ballard
Ingen Systems

I too would be interested to hear if it is possible to get DNN totally compliant.

I've recently created a pure CSS skin which I've managed to get working in all browsers - including IE7beta2. (It's working in XHTML transitional 1.0)

The issues of validation did come up. - You can get rid of a lot of the errors by tweaking the default.aspx file.

I managed to get it down to 19 errors, but then added a javascript switcher into the skin for the css which raised the number of errors.

Module development is definitely an issue. - CSS aside, if you place a module in your skin that is created in tables and all the code is in capitals and no closing tags on <br> etc. it can cause a lot of problems in terms of validation. - You can edit the modules, but this takes time and would be good to see developers taking XHTML compliant code into consideration.

The main thing to consider is does your skin display correctly in all of the browsers, is it accessible etc. - If I can say yes to those questions, I can live with a couple of validation errors, but if my clients started demanding totally valid code I would have to use a totally different system to DNN.

It is interesting and it's something that has just been raised here as well: http://forums.asp.net/12/1215723/ShowPost.aspx#1215723
(check page 12)

---

Lee Sykes - DNN Creative Magazine - 600+ Video Tutorials, Articles, Interviews - July Issue 58 out now!


Twitter: www.twitter.com/DNNCreative