Drupal Transition and Automated Web Page Cleanup

Frank Warmerdam warmerdam at pobox.com
Fri Dec 1 16:13:29 EST 2006


Folks,

Kanhaiya is working on the scripts to load the HTML content from CVS into
the Drupal site.  It seems that as part of the process there is some
desire to also transform the documents into valid XHTML - is that right?
I think Mateusz mentioned this having been discussed with Tyler and Jo.

It seems that some documents, like:

https://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/meetings/2006_02_04/MeetingAgenda.html

are rife with nonstandard html constructs, and converting to xhtml may be
a substantial effort in script development.  I'm also concerned that automated
"stripping" of nonstandard tags from documents like this may result in
documents that are unreadable, or at least unprofessional in appearance.

I would feel safer if the automated loading of documents applied only minimal
changes to the documents, and that any cleanup of documents either be done by
hand, or at least the results evaluated by hand to verify the results.

Does anyone have any input on whether we want to apply strict XHTML compliance
as part of the automated loading process?  If so, what sort of human validation
should we be doing of our web site?

PS. I am not again requiring XHTML compliance.  But it does "raise the bar" for
future contributions, and to be done well now I think it will add quite a bit
of work to the transition process.  I'm not really convinced this is the right
time to do it.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org





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