That Standards Guy



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That Standards Guy is the online persona of Karl Dawson, a web developer living and working in Ipswich, England.

I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and the Web Standards Group and team member at Accessites—an awards site to recognise accessible and usable websites.

I specialise as a front-end developer and worry about the minutae of semantic (X)HTML and CSS, accessibility, microformats, typographic rhythm and grid design. I also care about the user experience and remind myself constantly of visitor site goals when working with clients and their aims.

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Developing Microsoft CMS Solutions

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_POSITIONING attribute on the body element (causing horrid in-line CSS styles or tables depending on target browser schema — another dumb thing).
  • Everything after <body> is enclosed in a form tag.
  • 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.

Further reading:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under ASP.NET.

One Response to “Developing Microsoft CMS Solutions”

  1. Karl, we use VS2005 at work and it’s a lot lot better than VS2003. In fact, the reason we adopted VS2005 so early was because of the problems you mention with VS2003 - the faults it has making it virtually impossible to output valid XHTML for example.
    It is only early days with us for VS2005 so I couldn’t tell you offhand whether or not everything you mention is fixed but certainly it no longer capitalises stuff and moves your markup all over the shop. I still find I’m hand-coding labels though. Everyone in our department agrees it’s far better than VS2003 although everyone has still managed to find some gripe or other with it. But then again, you could probably say that about pretty much any development tool.
    Go get VS2005 as soon as you can.

    JackPSays:

    April 27th, 2006 at 10:41 am