Web Standards

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.

An ideal web presence presents an authentic and positive image of your company. On the web, strategic message design combined with an engaging graphical treatment of your website reinforces a lasting brand impression for your organization; this is how we make your vision a reality.

There are a variety of commercial and open source Web Content Management System (CMS) platforms in the market. We specialize in the installation, configuration, customization and template design of Web Content Management Systems based on Drupal. Drupal is extremely flexible and this characteristic makes it ideal for numerous configurations based on the unique requirements of every website.

cmsproducer.com has grown beyond the initial objective. It now serves to champion the development CMS powered websites based Web Standards, and W3C valid semantic markup. The Drupal framework has proven to be the ideal infrastructure for my projects. The visibility provided by the ideas and approaches discussed in the content on cmsproducer.com attracted notable individuals and organizations to request me to implement and brand Drupal powered CMS solutions for their institutions. With this momentum, I decided to leave my formal employment and dedicate all my time to my passion: Creation of websites based on Web Standards, and that are W3C valid, accessible, powered by a scalable and flexible CMS framework. Drupal has been the obvious choice for most of my clients and myself because it embodies, and is sustained by a similar passion for work-well-done.

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