Semantic Web

Those of us that wrote markup for websites more that four (4) years ago are aware of the situation where markup styles and standards become obsolete. Whether or not this could have been prevented by coding markup differently is a question I have had to ask myself when confronted with having to rewrite and improve upon code and website markup that has proven to be buggy, redundant, and far from the contemporary coding and XHTML markup standards

XML provides the promise and possibility of writing markup that can fit and be compatible with the coding and software standards of the future. XML by its definition is extensible and virtually unlimited in possibilities. Being that XML data can be parsed based on a DTD, and transformed using XSLT into virtually and data presentation format or proprietary format.

Conclusion
Data representation in XML enables you to transform it based on the markup standards of today, as well as those of the future.

Skinning and templating Drupal with themesÂ

Beyond creating a customized Drupal theme or skin that does not look like any of the out-of-the-box themes that are supplied with the application, ideal front-end Web Design and markup aims to create valid, accessible, and semantic markup that is visually pleasing, light on the browser (high content to markup ratio), and is easy for search engines to crawl.

In a related article, I touched on creating a Drupal homepage without the 'Blog look' that had come to be characteristic and typical of dynamic websites created by technologically savvy 'geeks' with little or no motivation and interest to apply equal or at least significant attention to the visual design and SEO viability of the web content. Successful and ideal CMS (Content Management System) implementation is transparent in the front-end. Technology should be an enabler of client-side features as being an impediment and unnecessarily manifesting itself to the user.

Here is an outline of some objectives and important points to consider in order to create A Drupal theme that fills the above needs and objectives

1. Start of by creating a layout in XHTML markup without thinking or taking into consideration any structural limitations of the CMS, and Drupal in this case (Just to clarify, Drupal themes are fully customizable using a rick library of theming functions). Make sure that your markup is not bloated or unnecessarily verbose in elements and attributes because doing so will affect your markup to content ratio which has an effect on SEO and page loading-times
   
2. For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), make sure that you create physical order for your content that will enable the search engine crawler to sequentially find and crawl the page content before it gets to routine and repetitive sections such as static menus, disclaimers, site seals and other content-poor objects and page sections that might distract it or lead it to secondary pages before it gets to crawl the page in question.
3. It goes without saying that table-layout it an accessibility no-no, and it unnecessarily limits flexibility and slows down site evolution and updates. Apply CSS to create a visual layout of your content.
   
4. Once you are satisfied with your static XHTML structure and the tentative or definitive CSS that you have on it, you can add PHP snippets to replace markup region contents with Drupal elements by inserting region snippets in your layout. If you want to add more content regions to place your blocks, menus and other Drupal content items, you can create them in template.php (PHPTemplate Drupal template engine) as explained in a related document.
5. Save the file as page.tpl.php and go on to customise the structure and standard markup of the other template files such as node.tpl.php, box.tpl.php etc
6. The Drupal templating structure allow visually limitless customization of any theming function and feature without touching core or module files - Drupal Theme Developers Guide .

If you need custom assistance and Drupal theme development, please contact us so that we can create a Drupal theme based on your branding and design guidelines and needs

In the migration from HTML web design to XML based design, why wouldn't one choose to skip XHTML and go straight to the source, cut the middle-man and code content in XML?

It may come as a surprise or shock to hear this, just when we all thought that XHTML was the happy in-between buggy, irregular and bad HTML, and the neat, orderly, structurally valid XML. Many web designers have come to like the comfort ease of use that one finds in HTML. Besides the short-comings of badly structured HTML and the mix of presentational and layout markup (Believe me, we all know some web designers who refuse to embrace semantic markup and CSS), we can all admit to have liked the forgiving nature of HTML.

It is not more or less a universally accepted fact that HTML 4.x and its predecessors are not future-compatible enough to be used in creating valid and stable web content that is accessible, and that stays faithful to the web content presentation architecture of separating content from design, from mark-up.

XHTML in its various flavours of Transitional, Strict, and to a lesser extent Frameset are quickly becoming the standard markup languages for web content. XHTML is a representation of XML, and when valid, it is as good as any other XML document that is built upon a valid DTD especially when well written, strict and valid.

Client-side XML

XML, the term and the technology is talk about and used almost everywhere. It is thought and talked about by everyone. It is now arguably the de-facto method for presenting and exchanging data between applications, disparate technologies and products. Most of the noise is being made about server-side or inter and intra-application interfacing. for client-side use, this is mostly installed applications.

Making a case for Client-side XML

As a subset of XML, XHTML by definition and characteristics complies with formatting and structural architecture of XML. Technically,XHTML is XML. It even has a DTD (Document Type Definition). If browsers support XHTML, the it supports XML. Through my trials and research, I have found that more browser versions support XML, than these that support CSS 2.x . It is ironic that CSS is more widely used than XML markup, yet they at least have the same support. It should therefore makes sense for anyone who prefers pure XML for markup to go ahead and markup his/her content in XML as opposed to XHTML, and much less in HTML.

This document is one of many that discuss the use of XML in Web Design

Similar to the above online tool provided by Chami.com especially for users familiar with the UI (User Interface) and functionality of HTML-Kit, Chami.com's new application (currently in Alpha version) HTML-Kit Tools for Windows/Linux has a similar feature for general web documents.

The document information window provides a progressively expandable and dynamic visual representation of the current document's DOM. This feature is useful in quickly understanding the DOM structure of a document to aid in scripting, or writing meaningful CSS with selectors of varying specificity (By understanding the DOM ancestry of a given element within the document tree, it is easy to write selectors of increased or reduced specificity).

CSS Poster for your stylesheets - This new online tool makes it possible to create quick reference posters for your CSS files.