RE: portals

From a W3C standards and WAI view, this is one of the most difficult areas to address in CMSs, as we can't assume that the author has or should have any knowledge of any publishing standards.  Ideally all they want is an authoring tool that will allow them to view their content in the style of the document to be published and mark it up like in Word, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, whatever, and the content owners have complete confidence that documents are correctly marked up.

I want to be able to set up CMSs and give authors an easy interface to publish to whose only knowledge of digital content is either web forms or a WYSIWYG editor.

It's still pipedream at the moment, but people are working on it.  But what you are saying here about Plone are great initiatives.

Geoff

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Croucher

Geoff is right on many of these points, a major problem in CMS is
maintaining standards of content authored by empowered non-web designers.
This causes problems because of the way a lot of users see web authoring
as similar to word processing.

Plone has several things in the pipeline to deal with this. The first of
which is the soon to be integrated Epoz editor. This is a WYSIWYG get
editor which works with the IE and Moz WYSIWYG widgets. The team who work
on that have spent a lot of time on ensuring that all the code is XHTML. I
have also been consulted to help them develop a system which enforces an
administator set site policy. So for example if an adminstrator chooses
WCAG-AA compliance as the site policy the editor should remind people to
enter necessary information to comply with that (obviously it can't be
enforced since not everything _needs_ an alt tag, so some things that
might may not get one), the aim being to make it harder for people to
ignore information they might need to add it. There is also a word-paste
feature which captures word pastes and strips it clean as it goes in
rather than retroactively doing it. This helps the user see what is really
going on, since there is always the risk that the look of the content
might be changed.

I am also working to develop an accessibility assistant which plugs into
the workflow system. This would help people run queries on individual
pages before publishing or allow audits of an entire site. The workflow
system is very powerful and it is easly conceavable that people could be
stopped from publishing content on the site until someone reponsible for
accessibility has ok'd it. Alternatively the accessibility checker could
allow them to sign their name to a report of the checked elements, so if
inaccessible pages are published someone is accountable. This fits in very
much with the Plone ethos of standards and style enforcement. In our a
community there is a big move towards using the most current standards and
best practice, and helping our users to use them too with guides and
tools. Almost all the tools we produce have some kind of "online" help.

There are probably a few more things going on which would help this if
anyone is interest there are people who can answer such questions on the
#plone IRC channel on the irc.freenode.net servers.


Tom

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 17:31:07 UTC