That Standards Guy



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That Standards Guy is the online persona of Karl Dawson, a web developer living and working in Ipswich, England.

I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and the Web Standards Group and team member at Accessites—an awards site to recognise accessible and usable websites.

I specialise as a front-end developer and worry about the minutae of semantic (X)HTML and CSS, accessibility, microformats, typographic rhythm and grid design. I also care about the user experience and remind myself constantly of visitor site goals when working with clients and their aims.

That Standards Guy is proudly powered by WordPress using my own “StrictlyTSG v3.0” theme. Site Policies.

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Archive for the ‘ASP.NET’ Category

Developing Microsoft CMS Solutions

Last week I attended a 4-day, on-site course for developing Microsoft Content Management System (CMS) solutions. Which was nice (to quote from The Fast Show).

With no previous asp.NET skills it was quite a challenge developing server and placeholder controls so lots of frenetic cutting and pasting of examples were the order of the day. I’m not sure I learnt anything in this regard but at least I know what to consider and ask of our trained developers if needs be. However, the biggest interest for me was of course the outputted markup — out of the box the markup from asp.NET 1.1 is pretty ugly. Only the “arrogance” of Microsoft could provide a “label” control that does not output label tags for example.

Bad markup first-hand:

  • Visual Studio 2003 has the nasty habit of altering your markup you wrote in HTML view when you switch to design view.
  • Element names in uppercase.
  • Incomplete DOCTYPE.
  • MS_POSITIONING attribute on the body element (causing horrid in-line CSS styles or tables depending on target browser schema — another dumb thing).
  • Everything after <body> is enclosed in a form tag.
  • Potentially huge viewstate variable for no reason whatsoever.
  • Horrid, inline JavaScript and event handlers.

I understand that Visual Studio 2005 has fixed some web standards and accessibility issues but unfortunately, we have an upcoming project that will pre-date the upgrade. Those of you subscribed via RSS will notice today that I’ve tagged a few asp.NET links today in my del.icio.us bookmarks as I start my research into creating standards-compliant and accessible templates.

Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll be able to write about a successful implementation of web standards and accessibility in an asp.NET 1.1 environment.

Further reading:

Missing DOCTYPES in ASP.NET

Oh well, despite my initial optimism that Visual Studio 2005 would indicate that Microsoft “get” web standards it would seem that the product only supports three DOCTYPES (DTD), namely legacy (i.e. the same crap that’s output now), XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.1.

Whilst Milan Negovan asks where HTML 4.01 Strict, HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict fit in, I’d like to know why they didn’t consult the W3C’s list of recommended DTDs (of which Milan’s missing DTDs are a part). Do take the time to read Milan’s post and subsequent links around the topic and add to your del.icio.us for future reference.

Tips for improved accessibility in ASP.NET 1.1

The web application development strategy here at work is based on asp.NET. These tips for improved accessibility in ASP.NET 1.1 will hopefully be of use to all asp.NET programmers having to do their best with providing some level of accessibility.

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