Forum Moderators: phranque
In response to this (and to satisfy my obsessive adherence to standards), I read up on the subject and the reasons behind the mess of compliance in this particular area.
It seems to me the biggest factor in holding up the progression of XHTML compliance within the webmaster community is IE's inability to parse XHTML pages with the correct MIME.
I made the jump to full compliance but obviously I didn't want to loose 80 percent of my traffic, so carefully looked at ways round the problem, while maintaining full standards. I've set up my server to sniff out the browser capabilities of the visitor when they arrive and it then serves up the appropriate code for that browser. For example, Opera gets the full application/xhtml+xml MIME type and the visitor enjoys lightening fast page rendering. Visitors arriving with sludgemop IE get served with HTML tag soup.
W3 validator gets served with full xhtml and I get 100 percent validation.
Crucially, after monitoring a couple of test pages, they were indexed in Google (not supplemental) and rank well.
So, this has prompted me to put together a little CMS system of my own that is totally compliant, works on just about any php enabled hardware (php script sniffs the browser type) and is very light. In fact, it's not really a CMS but a nice little website template that's well made IMO and easy to use. I'm now wondering if it would be a good idea to put it out on the web as a free template, perhaps with the condition that a link be left in the footer to my site... but I've never done anything like this before.
What are the main guidelines and principles behind releasing something open source and free? I feel sure many folk would find my template useful and would appreciate the compliance it gives them.
Advice?
The one thing I can suggest is that you create a website to advertise your CMS/template that actually USES it. That way developers can see that your system really works, and from looking through headers and source code they can determine that it does what you say it'll do.
