XHTML and the website

Sat Apr 5 15:17:22 UTC 2003

All,

Initially, apologies for the cross-posting.  Now that's out of the way:

In August last year, a commit was made to change the website to XHTML, and
since then, all the documents built from SGML have been happily announcing
in their DOCTYPE declaration that they are XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
However, with the exception of the front page of the web site, they aren't;
none of them validate.

I've started working on getting them to validate.
It's not difficult, it's just donkey work really, and I don't mind doing it,
but now that I've finished www/en/*sgml I'd like to get some feedback before
I go any further.

The patch for the above is at http://people.freebsd.org/~ceri/xhtml.diff.

Main points of interest/concern are:

1.	Upper case elements and attributes have to go.
	e.g., <IMG SRC="foo.jpg"> needs to become <img src="foo.jpg">.

2.	All tags need to be closed.
	e.g., <img src="foo.jpg"> needs to become <img src="foo.jpg" />.

#1 and #2 strike me as possible targets for complaints about repo-bloat.

3.	&header; had to be ripped into three pieces, as sgmlnorm won't let
	you leave an entity at a different level to that which you entered it.
	Thus the opening <body> had to be taken out of &header;.
	I've tried to compensate for this by moving some stuff into freebsd.css
	but I have no idea how CSSs work (and I'd like that to validate too),
	so we now have '<body alink="#FFCC33">' in all the SGML documents.

4.	As part of #3, we now also have to have &navbar; everywhere we want
	the navigation bar - it can't stay inside &header;.

Again, #3 and #4 cause me some concern; we know have X documents to edit if
we want to change the alink colour, but I'm wondering why we're specifying
this anyway in all honesty.

5.	I haven't messed about with web.site.mk enough to make this
	conditional; therefore, only the documents I have "fixed" build.
	I'm worried about what happens when I get to www/es and anything else
	in a language foreign to me.

One way around #5 is to introduce XMLDOCS in the Makefiles and move conforming
documents there from DOCS, and add a bit of glue to web.site.mk to deal with
them.

I understand that my proposal is somewhat incomplete at the moment, but while
I'd really like to see the web site validate, I don't know if this is something
that the collective wants.  Take this as a request for comments, with a patch
that is merely illustrative, not complete.

Thanks for reading,

Ceri
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