Re: portals

Hi Geoff,

Ah yes, this is going beyond "content" to create an "application", and 
an authoring application at that.

And now that you mention it, there are the "Authoring Tool 
Accessibility Guidelines", a W3C recommendation published in early 
2000, with an active working group - see http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU - and 
they talk about many of the issues you raise, as well as some others. 
It is true that doing this right is a bit more complex than just making 
a web page.

If you (or anyone) happen to have time to review those guidelines, 
evaluate a tool against them or provide some techniques, I presume the 
working group would be interested in the feedback (they're a small 
group taking on a large and complex task), and I would be myself.

cheers

Chaals

On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 15:26 Europe/Zurich, Geoff Deering wrote:

> The difficult area for portals or CMSs to address web standards and 
> WAI is the methods used for users to add content. Taken that the web 
> developers have produced templates that conform to a W3C grammar, and 
> it has no major inaccessibility issues, it is at the stage when users 
> add, modify or edit the content that it becomes very difficult to 
> manage and keep markup consistent with any formal grammar/dtd.
>
>  
>
> In most CMS systems this is done via a textarea, which is the place 
> where users insert their content in the document. Many CMS have 
> something like htmlarea as a toolbar that will allow the user to 
> markup the document. Mostly it is HTML soup. Some CMS do this and then 
> have a Tidy plugin to clean up the markup. There are also other 
> plugins in various CMSs that can find ABBRs and wrap that tag around 
> them and add a title attribute with meaning of the ABBR. There are 
> many similar plugins to help quality control user content, but it is 
> very difficult to do this and maintain documents with correct and 
> proper structure.
>
>  
>
> Anything beyond basic paragraphs with bold and italics and URLs, such 
> as lists and tables are very difficult for users to build without 
> coding HTML. As far as I know there is no one quite addressing this 
> issue (maybe BitFlux, but I haven’t tried it). I don’t know what Plone 
> does to address this issue (Tom)? Apache/Cocoon/Lenya I think is 
> probably the best framework for delivering content in a dynamic way, 
> but Lenya is not yet ready for prime time, and its not a trivial 
> system, it’s an advanced publishing framework. There are a lot of 
> other products that do a pretty good job, but I don’t think there is 
> anything out there that one can say is really mature addressing these 
> concerns?
>
>  
>
> Geoff
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 10:11:28 UTC