Hi Cam,

   Sheesh, should have searched before posting... oh well.  I've recently come across the very same irritation that you have.  It certainly doesn't stop the site from working, but while attempting to ensure a high rating by certain search engines, I attempted to test the html that was generated by DNN.  To my dismay, there are certain things that have been stated through research to be somewhat detrimental to being indexed by the likes of Google, etc.  (Certain Meta tags, etc).

I really would like all that I work on to be XHTML compliant and have gone as parsing through the idea of creating an httphandler to rewrite proper HTML, but that task should really begin at the source.  I just don't want my changes to be overwritten by new updates to the product.

Perhaps a standards committee might be needed for the project regarding XHMTL, etc?

Tim

I have been developing css based dnns kins for years now and it takes some extra work.

When I design a a skin I make sure that my basic template is error free and I change the default.aspx to be xhtml comliant and has xhtml transitional doctype. ( you need to modify the default.aspx for that )

When i develop custom modules I make sure that my output is also xhtml. Ofcourse i cannot control this from third party modules, so i try to use those as less as possible or i modify them. But then again most of the core mods dont comly either

And as an added bonus asp.net 1.1 out of the box doenst generate valid html

After i have made sure the skin is semantic and validly coded I dont care too much about the validation errors in the rest of the site, most are just because not recognizing of idtags because dnn core enerates it as uppercase

and a lot have to do with wrong replace of the contentpanes ( not in place of content panes but below an empty contentpane with tags that have nothing to do there )

there is no attribute "align".

...an id="dnn_ctr437_ContentPane" align="left"><!-- Start_Module_437 -->

And if you have a portal wher emore people edit content you can never be completly certain that others enter the correct data ( text html modules doent generate standard xhtml by default )

here are some of mine, the original code and skin validated the rest is just because of asp.net 11 and dnn, but at least they are completely table-less in the design

 

http://www.politieknieuws.nl

http://www.schwingsoft.com

http://z.nu.nl

Armand

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Armand Datema

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For those of us that are hoping to grow an enjoyable past time into a profitable business - let me share a real life experience I went through in August. 

It came down to myself and another vendor bidding to do a site for a professional organization in my province.  The other vendor was offering a LAMP solution with Joomla as the CMS.  The potential client was not overly technical.  However, when speaking of compliance and standards, while they may not have fully understood what they meant or their implications, they knew it was a good thing.  The other vendor was flogging this big time.

DNN as a product is at a competitive disadvantage with many other CMS in terms of compliance.  I did in the end get the client, but it was an uphill battle.  DNN is a superior product with greater usablity - in the end that was what won it.

Whatever anyone says in terms of SEO...DNN sites can get indexed just fine.  Some very simple skin mods can help.  My first blog post talks about one easy thing folks can do to make their skins more SEO friendly.

I recently read a post by Nina (not sure if it was a current one) where she speaks a bit about compliance and she raised a few good points.  I do not want to misquote her...but maybe some searches for her and compliance or XHTML will lead you to it.  She was more tolerant in her stance and had several good reasons for it.

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Shawn Duggan MCPD
BlueTango Software - Canada Web Content Management
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