There is a French dictum that says that cobblers are the worst shod (curiously, the English equivalent, « shoemaker’s children are the worst shod » bring children into the picture).
After having spent years teaching to my customers that they should follow the W3C recommendations, I have just finished to apply that to my own corporate site, http://dyomedea.com/english/!
For those of you who would like to see the difference, the old one now belongs to web.archive.org…
The new site is looking very different, but the structure has been kept similar and the old URIs haven’t changed.
Of course, the new site is now valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0, free from layout tables and of course, it is powered by XML.
In addition to classics (GNU/Linux, Apache, …); the site is powered by the new beta version of Orbeon PresentationServer.
This version has a lot of fancy stuff such as its Ajax based XForms support (that I am not using here) and a support out of the box for XHTML (which wasn’t the case in previous versions).
I am using it because I like this product (that’s a good reason, isn’t it?) and also to create dynamic pages:
- I send XHTML (as application/xhtml+xml) to browsers that announce they support it (and also to the W3C XHTML validator that doesn’t send accept headers; if you think that this wrong, vote for this bug!) and HTML to the others (Konqueror appears to be in that list!).
- Of course, I aggregate RSS 1.0 feeds (from XMLfr and from this blog) to display my latest articles and the XMLfr agenda.
- More interesting, I have developed a couple of new OPS generators to fetch in my mailbox the latest mails I have sent to public lists.
- These generators are using my TreeBind JAVA/XML API to read their config inputs.
- And, of course, an XML/XSLT platform helps a lot to manage the i18n issues (the site is in English and French) and to add goodies such as a site map.
That’s been fun, I should have done it before!
Next on my list should be to do the same with XMLfr…