[Frugalware-devel] Home Page Rewrite

Fri Jan 12 11:34:07 CET 2007

hi,

first, the current homepage is written by IroNiQ and Alex, so i'm just
telling my opinion :)

On Fri, Jan 12, 2007 at 10:13:14PM +1300, Isaac Johnston <isaac.johnston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1: Strict vs. Transitional doctype
> 
> Current: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
> Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
> 
> Proposed: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
> 
> This is the most important point of all - a strict document type is
> the foundation for quality markup and forces the separation of
> presentation from content.

agree

> 2: XHTML vs. HTML and media types.
> 
> Current: What looks like valid XHTML 1 is actually being served as
> invalid HTML due to an incorrect media type.
> isaac at pantalaimon:~$ /opt/bin/furl frugalware.org
> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:05:38 GMT
> Server: Apache
> X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.5
> Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=b0c8eac2eac22f09490951cc32fc5801; path=/
> Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
> Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
> Pragma: no-cache
> Connection: close
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
> 
> Proposed: HTML4 served as text/html.
> 
> http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
> "If you use XHTML, you should deliver it with the application/xhtml+xml
> MIME type. If you do not do so, you should use HTML4 instead of XHTML."
> 
> http://www.elementary-group-standards.com/html/why-xhtml.html
> "- XHTML 1.0 is not forward compatible; XHTML 2.0 will not be
> backwards compatible.
> - Serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml does't work in IE.
> - HTML 5 purports backwards compatibility."
> 
> Although there are other more subtle reasons from this alone I would
> conclude that, although I agree XHTML would still "work", HTML4 would
> be the best choice.

disagree. parsing html is very problematic, while xhtml is xml, i really
think that an xhtml->html transition would be bad. what would be the
valid content-type? text/xhtml? you are right about we should fix that

> 3: Accessibility / WAI
> Current: arguably the absolute minimum for WAI priority one.
> Proposed: ?

yes, as this was not an aspect while the current design of the homepage
(i mean architectural design) was created. i would we very happy if we
could improve it

> This email is already long enough so I shall leave it at that. At the
> very least this should get some conversation on the topic going ;)

sure, thanks for all your effort :)

udv / greetings,
VMiklos

-- 
Developer of Frugalware Linux, to make things frugal - http://frugalware.org