And Jon - let me acknowledge your contribution to DNN with SolPart (and all your other work). Look at our time stamps when we both joined the DNN website. We've both been around this technology a good while. Seen just a little bit of change - pretty much all of it for the better.

You've involved yourself with the core and that's a huge, huge credit to you (more than I've done). Please don't take any of my honest criticisms as flaming you or SolPart. You're a tremendous asset and so is SolPart.

My perspective is that of a consultant leveraging this technology in the real world. Our target market is large churches (anything larger than 1,000 members). Many have their own in-house web departments and they turn to us because of our expertise in DNN as it relates to the church market.

Because our clients are frequently web developers themselves - this is an issue for them (standards compliance that is). Consequently it's an issue for me. It's going to be an issue for any DNN consultant providing this to an enterprise business, etc... They know to look for it and it's not going away.  

DNN has been an example (for the most part) of Microsoft best practices. In my perspective DNN could (and arguably should) lead the way in W3C compliance. I know it's just a matter of DNN "having the will" to do it. It is physically possible.

"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")."

Not really. Valid XHTML markup is not possible on ASP.Net 1.1 if Microsoft ASP.Net controls are used without resorting to pre-rendering processing of the HTML using a request filter with regular expressions. This is both tricky and error-prone as the regular expression has to make intelligent decisions about what is rendered HTML and what is not. For example, if the page were displaying a forum post containing an example of bad HTML, the regex would have to be able to discern this and not fix it. Also, use of request filters imposes a serious performance penalty.

So, for all practical purposes, valid XHTML markup is not possible using ASP.Net 1.1.

With ASP.Net 2.0, it's very much possible.

Having a fully XHTML compliant version of DNN would certainly be nice. Getting there is going to require significant effort in fixing existing code while ensuring new code is compliant. While that is a big task, it's not impossible -- just darn complicated. What's even more complicated is ensuring that in achieving this goal we do not break the many thousands of deployed portals with modules from multiple sources. So, while it's nice and important to have DNN emit valid XHTML, we cannot rush to fixing one thing that breaks many other things. XHTML compliance will happen, but it will be a gradual process.

Nik 

wpballar:  If you really want w3c compliance enough to do some extra work, we have a solution you can try.  Our HrefExchanger module (originally designed for URL rewriting) has an option to post-process the HTML output of DNN for all the known non-compliant HTML.  It won't give you XHTML compliance - but it will get you as far as HTML Transitional (our DNN-based site home page passes - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inventua.com%2F). 

However, you must do the following on your own:

1. Make sure your skin and containers pass the W3C validator (i.e. don't contain any non-compliant elements)
2. If you are interested in CSS validation, edit the CSS files that ship with DNN and remove/edit the non-compliant bits
3. Manually edit the HTML in any instances of the Text/HTML module that contain non-compliant HTML

For more info, see http://www.inventua.com/dnn-hrefexchanger.content