Starting over in web development - asking for recommendations 3

[Olaf Doschke]

Hello,

Our company is starting over in web development, we're putting some more cats on the web.

There are some major decisions to make, as we are a small company (3 developers) rather as general decisions on what techniques to support, learn and develop in, specialising on custom data centric websites.

Way back 10 years ago we did intranet applications based on HTML 4 and classic ASP/VB. We think we'll pick up again at ASP.NET, but could also end up with PHP or Java.

For the first step we only need static pages and so the first decision is what html doctype to use. I don't see any reasons to still use HTML 4.01, or is there? (X)HTML5 may be a long term perspective, but it's too new to start right away with it.

What kind of Doctype would you choose, if you began a new web project? Also in respect of third party tools like jQuery, Yahoo YUI CSS Framwork, AJAX techniques and with what doctype they integrate best.

We may also base development on some CMS, but would rather like to do some basic stuff first, before diving into a ready-to-use framework, as you can't really judge about it'
s quality if you don't know some basics first.

What can you recommend as some first reads for a rusted web developer.

Existing development platforms are all products available in the Microsoft Action Pack "Development & Design", web relevant mainly VS.NET 2010 Professional, Expression Studio 4 Web Professional and SQL2008.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[vacunita]

For most projects HTML 4.01 Transitional should be enough. unless you need something else for some specific reason. Then you can use from other doctypes.

You can go Strict, if you are absolutely sure you'll separate style and layout from content and structure. As strict limits things like colors, fonts, sizes etc.. to CSS declarations. While Transitional has a bit more leeway.

For now its still HTML 4.01, until 5 leaves the draft phase and becomes a supported standard.

Go for a walk around the W3C's website. Since they are the ones implementing the html standards its only fitting you read through them first.

http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

Depending on your budget you may want to stay away from Microsoft Products for a while, as they can be quite expensive to acquire even for testing purposes. While other open source alternatives such as PHP may provide equal production value at a minimal cost.



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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.

http://behindtheweb.blogspot.com/

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I'll echo Phil's comments about using open source products. Over the years, I've used IIS, Apache, Tomcat, and numerous other web servers, and I simply cannot fault Apache.

I've also been using a fantastic PHP framework, Yii for the past year or so, and have found it amazingly simple to pick up, but very feature rich.

I can't recommend it enough, and it works very well with Apache... basically, I wouldn't be paying for any of your server software until you find you need to (which, hopefully, wont happen in a long while).

Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch:

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

Code Couch Snippets & Info:

http://www.codecouch.com/

The Out Atheism Campaign

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Thanks,

I rather thought about XHTML Strict or Transitional. Do you see any problem in support for that doctype with Rich Text Editors or CMS systems? Is HTML 4.01 still better supported with such products or open source projects?

Microsoft is the line of development tools we use anyway for desktop development, so there is no additional budget involved other than webhosting, but that's small fees compared to project costs for us and our customers anyway.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[vacunita]

I rather thought about XHTML Strict or Transitional. Do you see any problem in support for that doctype with Rich Text Editors or CMS systems? Is HTML 4.01 still better supported with such products or open source projects?

Yes, you have to really look into your CMS to find one that will adhere to the chosen doctype correctly when rendering pages. Take Joomla for instance, their page doesn't even validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. XHTML is also much more strict even the transitional one than HTML. CMS's I've encountered have a hard time adhering to such

The Rich text editors may cause some issues as they tend to use inline styles, that may interfere with any CSS in place.
They also lack support for more complex layouts.



----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.

http://behindtheweb.blogspot.com/

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

The Rich text editors may cause some issues as they tend to use inline styles, that may interfere with any CSS in place.

I agree... which is why for my last project, I decided to switch away from a WYSIWYG editor to a WYSIWYM editor - What You See Is What You Mean.

The editor in question is WYMeditor, and I find it rather good at stopping users from messing things up to the degree that WYSIWYG editors allow.

Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch:

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

Code Couch Snippets & Info:

http://www.codecouch.com/

The Out Atheism Campaign

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Thanks, valuable insights.

I'll take for granted, that existing tools still support HTML 4.01 Transitional better and that living with quirks is easier than limiting tools to generate stricter HTML or even XHTML.

And if you'd want to go with XHTML you'd rather need a toolset of less known and less frequent used components, like WYMeditor for example.

Personally I once used the Woltlab Burning Board, which is one of the few forums supporting XHTML (

http://www.woltlab.com/

,

http://www.woltlab.com/wbb/features-usability.html)

Also not ideal in validation, but it had much less quirks than the same forum done with phpBB, plus it had no attacks, while we had one or two with phpBB.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[kjv1611]

OlafDoschke,

I know you're looking primarily at the various technologies and all for now, but on the CMS side of things, I do strongly recommend

http://drupal.org.

Whether it is fully web standards compliant, I don't know. I think the base install is either fully or mostly, but once you begin adding stuff, it could become noncompliant. And along those lines, after a quick look, there appear to be a couple of different modules (plug-ins) for the CMS that help bring the site into compliance with standards. On that point, I'm glad I saw this thread, b/c it got me looking at those pieces.

Drupal is based on php and Apache, by the way.

BillyRayPreachersSon,

Thanks for your mention about the WYSIWYM editor as well. I've never heard of such, best I can recall, and I've been very annoyed at times with the WYSIWYG editors myself. I'll have to look into that option more!

Here's a module/plugin for that specific editor you mentioned on the drupal platform:

http://drupal.org/project/wymeditor

 

[Olaf Doschke]

kjv1611,

in regard to CMS systems in a regular developer meeting I have contacts to experts on Joomla, so that would be my favorite CMS, if we'd base some site on a CMS, despite of the fact it's generating nonvalidating XHTML. I think of validation as a nice-to-have. The less applicable the larger and more dynamic the system is. More important is cross browser working and barrier free HTML.

It's of course a good idea to start with a CMS anyway. That's surely an option I have in mind. I can recommend searching a CMS matching your needs via

http://www.cmsmatrix.org

with search options for all requirements you can think of.

Drupal of course is a major CMS system besides TYPO in TYPOlight or TYPO3 Enterprise flavor.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[kjv1611]

Yeah, the cmsmatrix site is a good one to look at for sure. I've looked there a few times. I've thought of the others, and given the time, I'd try several. I've been using the Drupal CMS now for a few years, and love it. Okay, there have been some headaches and hiccups along the way, but that's life. I don't know of a single product I've ever used where it didn't do something like I didn't want to.

When I got started with Drupal, I based it on lots of different reviews comparing different CMS tools as well as static vs CMS reviews. Sure, everyone's got an opinion, as well.

And another thing that got me looking at that was a few church websites that I found when wanting to change my church's site. I contacted the admins, and found they were using Drupal... and they were doing what I envisioned for our site.

Anyway, Joomla is another one I definitely considered. Also Wordpress has a large support base, I believe. The difference that moved me to Drupal seemed to be that it was less on the "easy" side, but more on the customizeable side.. or so I read. But since I've not taken the time to try the others for myself, I can't say for sure.

Let us know how things go with your revamping, whatever you go with. I know I'm always interested to see what different people use. You never know when you might find out something new that you're interested in (like when BRPS mentioned about the different in-site text editor.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

kjv1611,

I know I'm always interested to see what different people use.

Sure, that's why I started this thread. No matter what is advertised, what matters it what other web developers have success with and made good experiences.

Especially in the mix. A CMS is of course already a mixture of several things you'd otherwise need to put together when starting from scratch. With a CMS you typically decide for a language, mostly also a for a database, very few CMS do support several databases.

Other important things are community. Support and continual development, extensibility and customizability.

Bye, Olaf.