Well, I do not consider the DNN community to be hackers. It's a great community, and DNN is unbeatable in many ways--something to be proud of. The point I was trying to make is that we don't *WANT* the modules to be considered hack jobs. For non-software-engineers who just implement web applications, 100% valid XHTML truly is important. These (we) people are the liaison between software developers/vendors and graphic designers, and sophisticated designs these days require 100% valid XHTML. When designers go to a demo site and run Firefox's web developer toolbar's validator and see 128 errors, they react like, "This is crap!" Even though we know it's not. I guess it comes down to a question of marketing. *YOU* guys know that DNN is good stuff, and *I'M* convinced that it is, but it's hard to sell the solution to designers and management if it's very easy for designers/users/competitors to say, "Don't use that crap! Run a validator and you'll see what I mean." It may be unfounded, but pointing out invalid code is a very easy way to sway stakeholders away from competing products.

I really, honestly, am only bringing this up because I believe it's important and that a lot of developers don't realize they're shooting themselves in the foot by not producing valid code.

- John

FYI: we are moving in this direction (see my posts here and here ), but have to take care that making compliance changes does not affect the many thousands of legacy websites. This is also an area we're having to look very closely at at present as AJAX often relies on compliant markup (e.g. MS AJAX needs the xhtmlConformance mode set to strict - see http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/10/gotcha-don-t-use-xhtmlconformance-mode-legacy-with-asp-net-ajax.aspx )

BTW, you can set that mode yourself and it will dramatically improve the compliance of your skins.

Cathal

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