Comments on: Default HTML in Sharepoint 2007

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:39:26 +0000

@Jens Wedin: MOSS has a much wider audience than sweden and the 24webb guidelines, so I don’t think they affect MOSS that much. I might be wrong, but I’m not sure accessibility is that important in all countries…

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:37:48 +0000

@Johan Dewe: Good catch. What MOSS really needs is lots of projects like that. They not only help the developers working (struggling) with MOSS right now, but also send a powerful message to MS: “We need good interface code”.

@Aaron Schmidt: Thanks, but I doubt people from MS read this blog…

By: Aaron Schmidt

Aaron Schmidt — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:17:32 +0000

Great read! I was laughing out loud at onclick=”javascript:this.href=’#mainContent’;” href=”javascript:;” … that’s pure madness.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Hopefully someone (from MS) will listen.

By: Johan Dewe

Johan Dewe — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:17:26 +0000

I agree on all points, Emil, and our article really emphasize why Cameron Moll’s skinning is so impressive (at least by the looks of it).

But in this context it is important to point out that there are some community efforts trying to work around these issues, to some degree. I am thinking of Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) version 1.0, released in December last year. It claims to be a toolbox for creating web sites that conforms to WCAG 1.0 AA. It’s a set of master pages, new controls and webparts along with technical documentation. No silver bullet, for sure.

This first version 1,0 is aimed only at WCM sites. Next version will take care of team sites (don’t know about collaboration portals, though), they say. Hopefully, they be succeed - HTML compliance along with poor developer experience is SharePoint’s weakest points, imho.

Looking forward to see some of your customizations, Emil!

By: Sebastian Redl

Sebastian Redl — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:27:49 +0000

javascript: in handler attributes like onload works for either of two reasons:
1) javascript: is interpreted as a label or
2) it’s allowed for compatibility with stupid scripts.

But #1 would explain why this ever worked in the first place, so I’m leaning towards it.

By: MOSS should be spelt MOCKERY - Robert’s talk - Web development and Internet trends

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:00:54 +0000

[...] Default HTML in Sharepoint 2007 [...]

By: Jens Wedin

Jens Wedin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:11:42 +0000

Sorry about the spelling errors and the jjjj. Wrote the comment on the tube on my cellphone ;)

By: Jens Wedin

Jens Wedin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:01:11 +0000

As the public sector starts to using the WCAG/W3C/24webb. guidelines for internal projects like intranets and collaoration systems this must have big impact on MOSS.jjjj

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:57:50 +0000

It truly is remarkable isn’t it? I keep telling myself, “this isn’t THAT bad, is it?” and then I find some new horrible aspect of it. Yesterday I used a lowercase ASP.NET tag (ASP is case insensitive, so you should be able to do that), but found that MOSS added a new html element at the end, totally breaking everything. It’s bad.

By: Devon Young

Devon Young — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:31:41 +0000

I’m laughing so hard. This is THE funniest thing I’ve seen or heard in a long time. It tops this Forehead Shavecut thing I found a few days ago. If you’d posted this on April 1, I certainly wouldn’t have believed any of this. It just doesn’t make sense why anyone would purposely create a program that goes out of it’s way to make bad code… which means the makers of the program had to do extra work to make the users of the program do extra work. Huh?

By: Robert Nyman

Robert Nyman — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:03:20 +0000

Thanks for your clarifying and explanatory articles on MOSS/Sharepoint, they’re an invaluable resource!

I can’t fathom that a hack such as this even gets released. Where’s their Quality Assurance, where’s the performance, cross-browser and platform concerns, where is the accessibility (because what you show us is quite the opposite)?

By: Jens Wedin

Jens Wedin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:57:26 +0000

Thanks for sharing this. This really shows that Sharepoint 2007 cannot be used in the public sector (in Sweden) without big investments (time or $). I wonder if MS have thought about this? This must have an big impact on MS. What government or municipality wants to pay extra money just to make the system accessible and support standards?

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:53:51 +0000

If you liked the article, please Digg it. Thanks Kalle!

By: Default HTML in Sharepoint 2007 | Søren Madsens blog

Default HTML in Sharepoint 2007 | Søren Madsens blog — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:18:41 +0000

[...] Stenström has posted a very enlightening and humorous take on default HTML rendered by Sharepoint 2007. To put it mildly - he is not impressed. An example quote from the article Things start out really [...]

By: Martin S.

Martin S. — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:00:40 +0000

Thank you for your contribution to the community on Sharepoint 2007, Emil.

Thanks to your blogposts about that Microsoft product, I will really try to avoid the product if we’re to ship any custom design Sharepoint installation to a customer.

Code like this basically comes down to one thing - a back-end developer writes front-end code without really having a clue. A common misunderstanding at many, many companies today is any web programmer can write all the code necessary to fulfill the task.

Wonderful.