This may very well be the understatement of the century.

SharePoint is not only hard to style, but it is so far from semantically correct markup and accessible code that it blows my mind.  It has become less difficult to blow my mind these days.

I opened up the core.css file, which is the stylesheet that drives all of the SharePoint sites out of the box, and it is a gigantic 4,500 lines of CSS.  That is incredible.  To make matters worse, there isn’t a lick of inheritance.  Among several other things, the same exact font family is declared a lot.  Also, the core.css is declared last on the page, so forget about overriding the css that is already there.

Of course, people have found workarounds for much of these shenanigans.  An article by Cameron Moll has great insight and also links to other great resources.

No wonder so many companies are using the out of the box styles.  I am going to try and tackle this beast.  Wish me luck and I will be sure to post my findings here.

Comments (5)
Tags: sharepoint, css | Categories: Accessibility, Code, Setup

Although web standards have been thrown to the wayside in the past, more and more people are seeing the benefits of adhering to them.  I am going to outline what web standards are and how they can be beneficial to you.

What are web standards?

In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created to provide guidelines for web developers and the technologies that they use.  The W3C currently has around 450 member organizations, including, a big surprise here, Microsoft.

The W3C develops de facto standards to improve the way web related products interoperable between one another.  The groups within W3C try to gain consensus from all of the members of the organization, put together working drafts, and propose recommendations.  This process has been very successful at keeping standards relevant as well.  The usage and creation of web sites and content are very different than even 5 years ago.

How will I benefit from adhering to standards based design?

Faster load time for web pages

When you cut out all of the extra unneeded markup and redundant styling information, your pages load much faster and put less load on the server.  This will make your users extremely happy by improving load times.  No one likes a slow website.  They will just go to another competitor or a better site.

Simplified update of look and feel

Instead of changing code on every page of your site, you can easily change the entire look and feel of your site easily by using cascading style sheets (CSS) and changing only one file.  This ability has certainly changed web development forever.

Increased separation of code and content

Instead of adding styling code and other non standard code into your standard markup, you can take all styles information and dimensional information and pull it out into stylesheets, therefore making both your styling and HTML markup much easier to read and modify.

Decrease bandwidth and the space needed on your server

By taking out redundant code and repetitive styling information, you can drastically reduce the size of your site.  This is instrumental in very large sites that have thousands and thousands of pages.

Improved accessibility to all browsers and other Internet devices

You want to hit the largest audience possible, and by adhering to standards you will be doing that.  This is especially important for individuals with disabilities.  It is much easier for screen reader technology to read through content if there are not extra tags and styling information inline in the page.

Adhering to standards lowers costs

This one ties into almost all of the prior reasons.  You save money on servers because of less bandwidth costs, your code is easier to maintain, and updates are faster.  You will save money by following standards.

I hope that you call can see the benefits of adhering to web standards and start using it in your site.  It becomes second nature when you start using them.

Comments (11)
Tags: w3c | Categories: Accessibility