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Developing Microsoft CMS Solutions
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
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_POSITIONINGattribute on thebodyelement (causing horrid in-line CSS styles or tables depending on target browser schema — another dumb thing).- Everything after
<body>is enclosed in aformtag. - 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.
