Old site and semantic xhtml

[B.E.]

I imported my site into fusion 11 as a template, made a few changes and
republished the site, all went well.

I then changed the publish setting to Semantic XHTML and published it. All
the layouts on all the pages went wacky. Layout areas were shown below the
menus, it was a mess.

The pages looked fine in NOF 11 just a mess after I published them.

I changed the setting back to dynamic and republished it and all is well
again.

Question: Should/does a site have to be rebuilt from scratch to use the
semantic xhtml setting?

TIA
Brian

[=?iso-8859-1?Q?Chuck_=ABBeyondFusion=BB?=]

Brian,

Short answer: It depends on how the site was originally designed.

It's clear that every site isn't handled equally well when converting from
table-based to XHTML.

The more nested tables in the original design, the less likely it will
publish well as XHTML.

Inserted code can have an impact as well, since it isn't managed by Fusion.

Keep that in mind and most issues should be able to be solved.

I've taken a text box with inserted code behind it, for example, and set it
to publish with dynamic layout on a page being published as XHTML and it
fixed a layout problem when published.


--
Chuck Joslin
BeyondFusion.com - Your Fusion Community
www.beyondfusion.com

Register domain names at www.awavedomains.com

"B.E." <master_trancer@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:g2ets0$5do1@flsun90netnews01.netobjects.com.. .
>I imported my site into fusion 11 as a template, made a few changes and
>republished the site, all went well.
>
> I then changed the publish setting to Semantic XHTML and published it. All
> the layouts on all the pages went wacky. Layout areas were shown below the
> menus, it was a mess.
>
> The pages looked fine in NOF 11 just a mess after I published them.
>
> I changed the setting back to dynamic and republished it and all is well
> again.
>
> Question: Should/does a site have to be rebuilt from scratch to use the
> semantic xhtml setting?
>
> TIA
> Brian
>

[Karl Strieby]

B.E. wrote:
> I imported my site into fusion 11 as a template, made a few changes and
> republished the site, all went well.
>
> I then changed the publish setting to Semantic XHTML and published it. All
> the layouts on all the pages went wacky. Layout areas were shown below the
> menus, it was a mess.
>
> The pages looked fine in NOF 11 just a mess after I published them.
>
> I changed the setting back to dynamic and republished it and all is well
> again.
>
> Question: Should/does a site have to be rebuilt from scratch to use the
> semantic xhtml setting?
>
> TIA
> Brian

Hi Brian,

IMHO, the answer to your question should be "no". I would like to see
the NOF option to generate Semantic XHTML "just work".

The real problem is that it's a huge shift in thinking (and programming)
to make a code generator like NOF to create sites that use deeply-nested
HTML tables for layout to pure XTHML and CSS layout methods.

Let me pause briefly here to heap enormous praise on WSP for the effort
they have so far made with NOF 11 to make all-css layouts possible. It
was my want/need to make sites with proper Semantics that drove me to
move most of my site dev work into Dreamweaver several years ago.

That was a very costly decision to me, both in terms of the big bucks I
paid to Macrodobe, and the huge amount of time and effort I spent in
learning how to create good clean XTML and CSS code. I'm still glad I
made that move, mostly because I have complete control over my code now.

It was a hugely pleasant surprise to me to learn of the new Semantic
XHTML option in NOF 11. Like any new feature in NOF, it has some
remaining bugs that WSP can and should fix with an update.

- Bug #1 is that NOF is not really creating "Semantic" XHTML code. If
you look at the code it generates, there are a number of "in line" CSS
(style = "whatever") statements in the XHTML pages NOF 11 generates.
True "semantic XHTML" places all styling in the linked CSS files, and
does not embed any presentation information in the XTML.

-- Bug #2 is that NOF is not yet doing correct "CSS box model math" when
it comes to setting widths on things.

I will be reporting these issues to NOF support. Like they say in
Wisconsin, "We'll see once" what they do with the info I send them.

--
Cheers,
Karl Strieby
http://www.k-c-p.com/