[Frugalware-devel] Home Page Rewrite

Sat Jan 13 10:07:49 CET 2007

Isaac Johnston wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> Firstly to those who have not met me on IRC I'm Isaac Johnston - a
> full-time web application developer from New Zealand who recently
> started using frugalware. Today marks one week since I installed it,
> and I have been using it as my main system since. Having had quite a
> bit of experience with Redhat, Ubuntu, Debian, Crux and FreeBSD over
> the years I am extremely impressed at the quality of this
> distribution.
> 
> Re some discussions on IRC I would like to do a rewrite of the
> frontend (markup, styles and if required javascript) of the home page
> in HTML4 strict. This opportunity could be used to implement
> AlexExtremes revamped design and increase accessibility for people
> with disabilities.
> 
> Some reasons for this are dumped below - mostly I've copied the more
> important points from most of the links mentioned so you only really
> need to visit them if you want more information.
> 
> 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.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html
> "This is HTML 4.01 Strict DTD, which excludes the presentation
> attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as support for
> style sheets matures. Authors should use the Strict DTD when possible,
> but may use the Transitional DTD when support for presentation
> attribute and elements is required."
> 
> http://wellstyled.com/singlelang.php?lang=en&page=html-doctype-and-browser-mode.html 
> 
> A strict doctype will ensure your page is rendered in "standards
> compliance" rather than "quirks" mode which has a significant effect
> on how the page is displayed.
> 
> http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/tommy-olsson.cfm
> "most people overestimate the benefits of XHTML, at the same time as
> they underestimate the benefits of using a Strict DTD. In my opinion,
> using a Strict DTD, either HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict, is
> far more important for the quality of the future web than whether or
> not there is an X in front of the name. The Strict DTD promotes a
> separation of structure and presentation, which makes a site so much
> easier to maintain. You can re-style a site completely by updating a
> single CSS file, rather than making identical changes to 10,000 pages
> with presentational markup.
> 
> It also has lots of benefits for the user (quicker download) and the
> server (less bandwidth), as well as for search engines (better
> content-to-markup ratio). Last but not least, it makes it a lot easier
> to create an accessible site.
> 
> The main cause of confusion seems to be that many web authors think
> that HTML must be written as 'tag soup.' The truth is that you can -
> and should! - write HTML 4.01 that is almost identical to XHTML 1.0.
> Just because HTML allows some shortcuts doesn't mean that you should
> use them."
> 
> http://www.thepickards.co.uk/index.php/200609/its-time-to-kill-off-transitional-doctypes/ 
> 
> http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=23#n23
> 
> 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.
> 
> 3: Accessibility / WAI
> Current: arguably the absolute minimum for WAI priority one.
> Proposed: ?
> 
> This is such a broad subject I will simply direct you to some great
> articles if your interested.
> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/wiwa/
> http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/06/14/why-accessibility/
> 
> and of course...
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
> 
> 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 ;)
> 
> Cheers
> Isaac

This is OK to me. I think HTML 4 would be better probably, as it's more 
widely supported. Of course we could switch to XHTML easily when 
Microsoft actually get their act together and support it correctly. I'll 
post a screenshot soon of what I had planned for the homepage.

Also, I take it the new design (WAI and Javascript) would be 
backend-independent? Currently I'm working on a new backend based on 
Django in Python, and hopefully I won't have to change any of it :)

Thanks,
Alex

-- 
Alex Smith
Frugalware Linux developer - http://www.frugalware.org