Frontline Update

Categories: Development Created by ben van 't ende
The Content Rendering Group (CRG) appears to be less active lately; at least that's what Marc Wöhlken (author of Advanced HTML Cleaner ? qcom_htmlcleaner) believed. The last article in the CRG's TYPO3.org page was posted several months ago, so it's understandable that people have this impression. Marc's email reminded me to give all you good folks an update of what is going on... and things are going on!

TYPO3 4.0 and CRG

The Content Rendering Group was anarchistically formed for those interested in accessible output and XHTML compliance. Sebastian Kurfuerst is currently our main developer; he lends an open ear to all desperate calls for the afore-mentioned and is also striving to get needed patches into the TYPO3 CORE. Of course there are several others members with various responsibilities; and you can see who they are on the WIKI pages: <link http: wiki.typo3.org index.php content_rendering>wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Content_Rendering The WIKI also contains bugs concerning content rendering. The CRG's lack of recent news can be attributed to our work in resolving issues. We have already squashed several bugs in TYPO3 4.0 beta1, and we plan to have all the big issues fixed before the final version is released. The upcoming release will be one of the most significant TYPO3 updates ever, in terms of features and content rendering. This is the largest number of people to work on one TYPO3 release! The CRG is focusing on 4 things for the new release:
  1. accessible mailforms

  2. accessible tables

  3. accessible menu and sitemap

  4. CSS styled imgtext

Mailform

The mailform is complete; you can use either a table based layout for your form, or CSS styling. CSS based layout is the default in new installation.

Table

The table element was another major issue; several people have complained about it's limited functionality. Understandable, although it does a fine job for most people. A big ?thank you? to Rupert Germann, who did the initial work for making the table content element accessible. He added table summary and caption, and numerous other items to improve accessibility. These changes were previously published as the extension accessible_tables, and are now included in CSS styled content.

One major surprise for the table content element is the possibility to import CSV files as is from a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or OOo Calc, and still use the table wizard. Advantages are obvious; who wants to replace field delimiters with pipes and remove text delimiters? Additional testing is required, but the feature is almost ready for production.

Menu / sitemap

In addition to the larger changes, the sitemap and other menu items are now rendered for accessibility. This further improves navigation for people with disabilities. Currently, the sitemap is rendered with classes that represent the levels; however, this is not logical ? there is nothing in the construction that provides disabled users with any clue about each level's relationship with one another. The default TS has been changed in CSS styled content to output a really neat unordered nested list. An example can be found on my page <link http: ben.vantende.net menu css-menu-2>ben.vantende.net/menu/css-menu-2/. You can also find other menu examples there.

Life in a table?

One of the biggest tasks comes last. Ernesto Baschny is the man who took on the IMGTEXT object, which was a nuisance to all. Some users even resorted to using the RTE to produce some kind of accessible output. The current IMGTEXT (and IMAGE) object consists of a table container housing the text and images. There is currently no escape from a table, and a solution is required to free the residents of IMGTEXT. You can still find the remnants of some heroic efforts in TER; most if which are obsolete or waiting to be terminated. Our man Ernesto is working on it and hopes to have all work finished by the end of this month, and we hope to have it in the CORE by then. css_imgtext features various rendering modes; the default rendering mode for images in both IMGTEXT and IMAGE is a definition list, with more options available - although the definition list is the logical choice in most cases.

Backwards compatibility

Backwards compatibility is key to the success of TYPO3, but we were forced to implement some non-backwards compatible solutions during our work on accessibility. Fortunately, Sebastian has created a maintenance solution; he developed an update wizard for the install tool. After upgrading your TYPO3 installation, everything behaves as it did. To activate accessible rendering, you'll most likely want to make some adjustments to your site's CSS. Simply run the update wizard to see a list of all needed changes. In new TYPO3 installations, you will be presented with accessible mailform rendering (removing the from inside table cells), and a semantical mode for menu ce's right out of the box.

To sum it up: there are no changes to existing installations, but all new features are enabled by default in new installations.

Unsung heroes

What else is going on? Well, there is finally an XHTML template for indexed search, and we have Michael Stucki to thank for that. A lively discussion about this has been going on since the second snowboard tour. Stanislas Roland has been assigned to the ?New default RTE? project: association.typo3.org/index.php. He is doing a tremendous job in getting a sensible configuration into the RTE. You can follow his progress in the typo3.projects.rte newsgroup on news.netfielders.de. The default configuration strips the old school font tag and outputs the correct strong and em tags for bold and italic. The MS Word cleaner function is also awesome.

My conclusion would be that we can build XHTML_strict sites with TYPO3 4.0