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Re: CMS modernity (was: address tag)

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Nov 30, 2006 9:40AM

> Xstandard is quite nice.

It is, certainly in terms of code produced.

The last stage of that set of posts will be to hold up the three main
free ones against each of the criteria I've explored, both in 'out of
the box' form and once configured as best I can.

If it were keyboard (and screen reader) accessible I'd consider it a
viable option at work. (I know they are working on that, but I don't
think it's come to fruition yet.)

> The nice thing about Xstandard is that, to an extent, you can steer
> folks in the right direction by limiting the styles and
> markup they can use.

It does to a certain extent, but I'm not sure it goes far enough. In
our's we've been fairly successful with that general approach so far,
especially if you set things up to *look* wrong when the underlying code
is wrong.

> That said, no matter how hard you try, someone can still STRONG a
> line of text instead of making it a H* tag.

True, although something like strong {display: run-in;} can highlight
that if supported, or an "onsave" check could test for that.

One of my next posts is on preventing problems, if anyone would like to
email me typical problems please do! I'll have a go at coming up with
solutions that could be built into editors/CMSs.

> The only real way around that is to have very specific and definted
> content templates...which seem great in theory, but tend to be a real
> pain in the real world for a lot of web sites.

True, but if the editor came with a basic set that would reduce the pain
significantly.

> Also, while not ideal, Xstandard's table editor is fairly robust (I
> noticed you were complaining about that in other WYSIWYG
> editors on your blog).

I've only tried the free one so far, which wasn't wrong, but didn't go
far enough (if you look at the functionality I proposed). I'll try the
paid for version when I'm at that stage.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience

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