1 Great!

Sounds like a very impressive and useful tool. I was looking for something of this nature and decided on a very nice PHP and MySQL program, Wordpress [ http://wordpress.org/ ]. Currently using it on my website and it works like a charm. Great article.

posted at 09:21 am on June 6, 2003 by Jesse R.

2 nice...but

nice… but it doesn’t seem like the usual type of alistapart article. where’s the technical know-how? where’s the lesson?
seems to me like a blatant product plug, and an attempt to make alistapart a little more like other magazines, and less underground.
i’m not really compaining, but i’ve gotten used to ALA giving me something to work with, not just an interview.

posted at 10:46 am on June 6, 2003 by jim

3 What about user input?

Even though I’ve strived to make my MT templates usable and valid, I often slip up and forget to encode ampersands in links to other sites. I wonder it Typepad will try and deal with bad user input…other wise you will have a nice valid wrapper around invalid content.

posted at 11:05 am on June 6, 2003 by Patrick Berry

4 Yeah...

Indeed, I often do that as well. They stated that more advanced users dislike auto-correction and I see their point, but I certainly would love it if I didn’t have to go and edit little mistakes like that.

posted at 11:39 am on June 6, 2003 by Jesse R.

5 re: nice...but

Jim:

We knew this was a different type of ALA article and we also knew that some readers might view it as commercial. But we felt there was a genuine news angle to a product that lets anyone publish a standards-compliant site and that itself is built with standards … and who, if not A List Apart, would tell that kind of story? Many ALA readers ask, where are the standards-compliant Content Management Systems? Well, here is one. We felt the “service to our readers” aspect outweighed any potential downside. And we also thought an interview was the best way to deliver the information. Future ALA articles will continue the tradition of sharing how to achieve particular tasks, providing downloadable (open) source code, and so on.

posted at 11:43 am on June 6, 2003 by zeldman

6 auto-escaping

<cite>I certainly would love it if I didn’t have to go and edit little mistakes like that.</cite>

We actually have an attribute in our template tags (if you don’t use MT, we have a system of tags which can be used to control output) that will automatically escape any content within them to be XHTML-compliant if you’re like me and tend to forget to do it manually. Those tags will all still be available to advanced users.

And regarding the “commercial” nature of the interview, I’ve been a standards advocate for a long time, and aside from the “no [em]real[/em] companies use web standards” argument, the second most common thing I’ve heard is that standards are only valuable for documents, not web apps. We’re hoping that real examples of “normal” (which means non-techie, to business folks) people using standards in a web app will help others to see the advantages.

We will be putting out more nuts and bolts info in the future, and honestly, a lot of the details of our implementation are things that have already been discussed on ALA as far as the proper use of semantic markup goes.

posted at 12:33 pm on June 6, 2003 by Anil

7 Another alternative

One good CMS that is often overlooked is pMachine (http://www.pmachine.com). The default template is valid XHTML and CSS (and it attempts to make user-created templates valid as well), and it has a slew of features allowing it to be used for everything from a basic weblog to a complete site CMS for web designers and their clients. The nonconformist in me just wouldn’t let me use Movable Type, and I am very happy that I found pMachine to use instead.

posted at 12:37 pm on June 6, 2003 by Erika

8 Can you say "advertorial"?

I have a great deal of respect for Anil and the Movable Type crew. But I’m with Jim: This is, flat-out, an advertorial for the new TypePad service.

ALA readers would benefit much more from an article in which Anil, or Mena Trott, carefully explained the process of coding those templates. That would (most importantly, of course) still allow them to get their marketing message across, but at least we developers would get something out of it.

posted at 01:03 pm on June 6, 2003 by Adrian

9 Is this article appropriate?

A List Apart has always been a vehicle to enlighten those of us who make websites. In otherwords, it introduces methods and tools to help us perfect our art. To my mind, this article is doing more of the same. Although it differs from the usual piece, it is still informing us of a new tool that may assist us in creating web documents in a standards-compliant manner.

I see nothing wrong with this article. It isn’t some sort of a ‘sell out.’ After reading the piece, I still feel as if I’ve learned something, even if it isn’t some new design or authoring technique.

Incidentally, it is GOOD to see A List Apart back in business again. If only Jeffrey could have written his book as quickly as I read it ;)

posted at 02:29 pm on June 6, 2003 by Simon Jessey

10 Standards Compliant Tools

WordPress (mentioned above, http://wordpress.org) from the beginning has been XHTML 1.1 compliant out of the box in all but its doctype, which is transitional for compatibility. We try our best to embody the spirit and letter of standards in our site, templates, and our administration interface, a section which is often overlooked due to the general public never seeing it. We’ve also done our best to make the default template as semantically correct as possible, using nested unordered lists for the menus, a proper hierarchy of heading tags, and contextual selectors where ever possible.

Standards compliance has always been a priority for us and I applaud the 6A team for their efforts as well, although it was my impression that MT has been compliant for a while, and so this is not new with TypePad. Since I trust the people behind ALA I trust that this was not meant as an “advertorial” as a previous poster put it, but it sure comes off that way. There are several tools that are serious about standards that five minutes with Google would have made for a much more diverse and interesting article.

posted at 02:50 pm on June 6, 2003 by Matthew Mullenweg