[Marketing] (x)HTML standard for new site?

[Seb Potter]

>> - we have to go clean *all* the articles looking for elements like
>> <br>, <hr>, <img>, etc...
>
> I agree, from a content perspective, manually cleaning all the live 
> article would be a major pain. But Seb mentioned on #evolt that he has 
> some kind of cleanup tool.

Indeed. I'm in the middle of testing this against the entire content base 
at the moment, and Will let you know how it goes.

>>> Now while I'm not really all *that* bothered, I can see that using
>>> HTML4.01 (/me hopes to high heaven that this doesn't also mean
>>> table-based layout) will lose us a lot of credibility externally.
>>
>> i didn't suggest table-based layout... and i agree, a lot of people
>> would give us crap for it,

There is a third option that I will put to desdev, and this follows from my 
suggestion of having multiple views of content through a transformation 
process, and is my argument for actually writing the templates in xhtml1 
*strict*:

With the templates and content in xhtml1 strict, they are valid xml. This 
means we can use a transform through xslt to output pages as other formats, 
such as pdf, rtf, plain text... and if necessary we could produce an xslt 
that outputs html4.01

For me, this isn't a decision, it's just obvioulsy the correct thing to do 
from an application architecture point of view. Doing it any other way is a 
compromise that reduces our ability to expand evolt. It also makes a fully 
open and standards compliant method of providing things like rdf feeds... 
no need for bespoke code solution to open a database connection, retrieve 
relevant data and manually construct the rdf... you just take your template 
and transform it in xsl.

In terms of marketing, evolt cannot afford to be seen to be agonising over 
trivialities like xhtml or html, or even making a decision to support one 
or the other. If we go down one route and cut the other off, that's when we 
lose.

- seb



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