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Re: CMS modernity (was: address tag)

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Dec 3, 2006 10:40AM


I've found this discussion great as I have been in the market for a good
accessible CMS for over a year. I have played with 4-5 and am about to play
with Joomla.

While I appreciate the comments in blog cited below in this e-mail, I am
struck by the fact that it was written in October 2004 and that all of the
comments were from that same time period. So I wonder if this person has a
different opinion now or whether things have not changed at all in the past
two years?

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Tim Beadle
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:43 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] CMS modernity (was: address tag)

On 30/11/06, Austin, Darrel < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Seems that many CMSes these days are a decade behind in terms of
> concepts like semantic markup, accessible markup, CSS-P, and true
> separation of content and structure.

Yep, although European CMSs (according to a session at User Experience
2006 that I attended) tend to be newer and therefore have less legacy cruft
than US ones. It was also claimed that accessibility of US CMSs is *worse*
than their European counterparts for the same reason (this despite the
existence of ADA, 508 etc). Disclaimer: I am not an American.

> Even 'modern' CMSes products like Joomla still have presentation
> markup stuck in the DB and intertwined into their own templating engines.

Indeed - same with Drupal (an otherwise impressive system).

> (I have a rather bad opinion of the CMS market space... ;o)

Me too. We're not alone:
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000622.html

The problem extends to open source CMSs too; the 6-figure license vendors
aren't alone in their rubbishness ;)

Tim

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