RE: What generates a .cfm page?

Bruce, Charles, et al,

Charles is correct, Cold Fusion can be made quite accessible very easily.
The key is to code the "template" (basically just extend HTML) with
accessibility in mind.

CAST is using Cold Fusion more and more in our web efforts. In terms of a
development environment, I find Studio (and its subset Homesite) to be
highly customizable and accessible. You can even remap the keyboard
equivalent for every function. For those who prefer a WYSIWYG environment,
it is designed to work in concert with Dreamweaver to create good, clean,
accessible code.

Hope this helps.

David M. Clark
CAST, Inc., 39 Cross St., Peabody, MA  01960
Tel 978-531-8555 x236 - Fax 978-531-0192
Email dmclark@cast.org
http://www.cast.org/bobby/

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 1999 7:02 PM
To: webmaster@dors.sailorsite.net
Cc: 'Web Accessibility Initiative'
Subject: RE: What generates a .cfm page?

Bruce,

Sorry, but the stuff I did is not available for public consumption.

What I did was hand-write my pages - it meant I had to learn something about
CFML, which is in fact a very simple language, and a bit about SQL which is
really really simple. If this is being done by someone who knows anything
about programming it should be very simple.

HomeSite (also by Allaire) has full support for CFML and the WAI authoring
tools group would be very interested in what it is like for producing
accessible CFML - Gregory Rosmaita reviewed it against the Last Call draft
of
the Authoring Tool Guidelines for producing HTML and CSS. That review is
linked from http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/tools (but it should be noted that the
guidelines have changed since then).

If anyone does have a play around with HomeSite (there is a 30-day
evaluation
version available from http://www.allaire.com if anyone is interested)
please
let us know what happens.

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Thu, 14 Oct 1999, Bruce Bailey wrote:

  Such fast answers.  I love this list!

  > There is also a product called "Cold Fusion Studio", which is an
  authoring
  > tool for producing cold fusion pages.
  >
  > Cold Fusion provides, and I believe Cold Fusion Studio makes extensive
  use
  > of, a number of Java applets, scripts, etc. for producing pages to use
  with
  > Cold Fusion.
  >
  > This is more likely to be the problem, and if you can get the developers
  to
  > commit to producing accessible pages they can do it with Cold Fusion.

  Charles, I agree with your conclusion that this is the heart of the
matter.
   I suspect GWU just has a bunch of students running the show.  How bad are
  the built-in / sample scripts (etc.) that ship with the product?  Okay, so
  you can do it, but about how much work is it to make Cold Fusion produce
  pages that parse through the W3C validator or meet the Priority 1
  checkpoints of the WCAG?  Is it relatively easy (if one is aware of the
  issues) or does one really have to fight with the package?  (FrontPage,
for
  example, really makes it difficult to produce clean pages!  So much so,
  that one has to wonder "why bother?")  Is the utilization of frames
endemic
  to Cold Fusion, or is that GWU's own bad idea?

  > In the case of Cold Fusion it is easy enough to write by hand, and can
be
  > used to create any kind of page, from completely inaccessible to
  completely
  > accessible - I have used it for building a picture gallery with
extensive
  > alternative content as a demonstration of an accessible site, and for
  > building an accessible payroll data entry system.

  Can anyone point me to any resources on how to use Cold Fusion to follow
  the WCAG?  Charles, is any of your good .cfm stuff available for browsing
  by civilians over the internet?  Can anyone point me to a site that uses
  .cfm and is accessible?  The Allaire home page is certainly not a good
  example!

  > Cold Fusion is a piece of server-side software that allows web pages to
  be
  > dynamically generated from a database. This is the same kind of thing
  that is
  > now also done by quite a lot of server software - Domino, Active Server
  > Pages, PHP scripting, etc.

  Is GWU better off pitching Cold Fusion for something else?  (If so, this
  will be a tough sell.)

  Thanks again.


--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Friday, 15 October 1999 11:08:01 UTC