RE: Re: DHTML browsers [was Accessibility]

> I haven't worked with many, but even conceptually they all suck as
> they merge 
> content with presentation. 

Right...that's where XStandard was nice. It was pretty much purely a
semantic markup tool, rather than some sort of page layout tool. FOr
instance, if you make a table in Xstandard, it assumes you're actually
displaying tabular data and then prompts for things like table headers and
such. 

> There do not seem to be any hard and fast rules on structuring
> content into 
> templates.  Personally I don't like seeing each paragraph as a field,
> but I 
> also don't like lazy templates that are just wrappers for the WYSIWYG
> with one 
> or two other fields.

I agree. I'm not sure what the solution is. In our case, we're building our
own CMS and as we notice 'chunks' of content that appear can be further
segregated, we go back in and do so. However, that's not ideal and certainly
wouldn't work for gigantic enterprise wide CMS tools.

Until then, I'm trying to push more and more semantic markup on
people...starting with proper use of MS-Word. There's a total lack of
understanding of how to even properly structure a document in Word. Using
lists for actual lists, using heading styles for actual headings, etc.
Hopefully, by starting there, we'll get folks ready to jump into the web
updates.

Another thing I try to do is hide all formatting from the content editors. I
prohibit them from making color choices or font choices, etc. I find this is
frustrating to the them, but hopefully, over time, they'll learn to focus on
the content and not worry as much about the layout (since that's our job).

> Unfortunately, anything using ActiveX is not an option as business
> users may 
> not have admin rights on their machines and SMS updates can blow
> those things 
> away.

Yea, we're really hoping Xtstandard can come out with a non active-x
version. My fingers are crossed.

Ultimately, the solution may revolve around XML templates. The more I work
with XML (I'm pretty much a newbie to all of that) the more I see the
disadvantage of storing content using the limited palet of HTML tags for
structure.

-Darrel