Hello all,

I'm writing to hopefully continue a discussion that was first started by Cathal Connolly's blog entry about DNN and its implementation of W3C standards such as XHTML.  This blog was posted the 6/21/2006 and you can read it here.

Being a technical architect for a services company I'm all about standards and although I still believe there's plenty of work that needs to be done by browsers with implementation of XHTML, CSS and the like, I truly believe in the fundamental principals of standards and their implementation and hope that the trend continues to a core set of accessbility and compliance standards to make all our lives a little bit easier.

So, as the story goes, for one of my projects I'm now using DNN as the core product and in my specification I feel obliged, as both a developer and someone taking money from the client, to make sure that core standards and good practices are adhered to and to make sure that the deliverables are cutting edge and somewhat future proof.

DNN 4.3 is a great implementation of what a CMS should be and built on .NET 2.0 really it is pushing the boundaries of the available development platforms.  A very nice selling point.

So as I delved a bit deeper and got to my Accessbility section of my specification (admittedly it's near the end of the spec) I started to look at the accessbility implementation of DNN. 

First the source code showed a DTD of HTML 4.01 Transitional.  A little shocked at this as that spec was released 10 years ago in 1997, I marched on, after all the spec is a old but tried and tested right back to the earlier browsers (not as far back as Mosaic thankfully!).  

My next stop was the W3C validator, from which I entered http://www.dotnetnuke.com, more out of curiosity than anything, and imagine my horror that it returned a "

This page is not Valid HTML 4.0 Transitional!

"
Not only that the validator found 125 errors!

Now that the shock has worn off and the Cathal Connolly blog comments have peterred out I thought it best to resurrect this issue here. 

Namely:

• What are the plans for DNN even supporting their stated DTD let alone XHTML
• What have other community members/DNN faithfuls done about this, if anything?

Now I understand this is all open source and I can easily go through and correct the errors when and where they are.  And that's probably what I'm going to do - what I'm more looking for is a discussion about the standards and accessiblity requirements that are starting to become law in certain countries.  And what about the people that these standards and, more to the point, accessiblity fundamentals are meant to help?

I'm probably getting a bit carried away here and i'll get down off my soap box, but just please, the open source community shouldn't be just about making software free to all developers, it should be about making software solutions free to every users and that includes everyone from the browser fanatics to the browser blind.

Cam Church

Shawn,

Thanks for your reply and info.  Truth be told I was hoping I'd have sparked off a bit more of a debate but such is life!

If there's anything I can do to help the DNN core team bring the site up to higher standards, even if its trawling through the HTML code page by page, please let me know!

Cheers
Cam Church

Hi 'TrudeauConsulting'

Thanks for replying and offering your thoughts. 

Overall I completely agree with what you're saying.  There are alot of guys like you that a) don't know what the current set of standards are; b) dont' really care what that the standards are; and probably most importantly c) don't really know what the standards do for you and your business.

It's very much like website developers themsevles.  They don't care how the data comes from a database application, they just want it they way they want it everytime.  And it would be nice to know, in the back of their minds, that this data is coming as speedily and readily as possible.  And as the user base grows that it will scale so they don't have rewrite and rewrite and rewrite their apps with every major environmental change. 

However instead of a database we have DNN and instead of data we have the end user experience.  As your site grows you may not really care that it meets a set of standards (whatever that be), you just want to know that all your users are getting the same functionality and same experience no matter who, where or how many there are.

So like I would and do expect the SQL Server team in Redmond to follow best code and software engineering design practices I would hope the best out of DNN as well.  And with any web tool comes web standards. 

Don't get me wrong though, DNN is a giant leap forward in open source CMS solutions.  It just, in my opinion, could use a tune up in the web standards department to make sure their end users can in turn give their clients/end users the best possible experience no matter who they are.

Cheers
Cam Church