Why use Aggiorno?

With the growing use of an extensive range of devices, and the growing emphasis on accessibility, as well as the increasing complexity of Web processing by search engines and other services, will your business miss out on opportunities if your pages are not standards-compliant? And how can you ensure the widest acceptability of your content?

As a Web developer, you have enough to do without constantly dealing with challenges such as updating legacy Web pages to comply with Web standards.

Aggiorno makes it easier to create Web sites that are fully Web standards compliant as well as upgrading those that are not, because it is the first refactoring tool that lets you focus on business goals. Aggiorno encapsulates enough knowledge to encompass hundreds of current recommended refactorings in a single click, making your site smoothly transition to today's best Web development practices in a snap. Web developers today struggle unnecessarily in order to achieve these productivity-enhancing goals:

1. HTML/XHTML Compliance
2. Accessibility
3. Content And Style Separation

Why are these important? Check out the paragraphs below, and you’ll have a clearer idea of what’s at stake if your Web sites fail to comply in any of these areas. And why having Aggiorno at your side when trying to make the move can save you tears and dollars.

XHTML Compliance: Why is it important and why should you care?

One of the problems with developing Web Content is that what it says and how it looks are often poorly correlated. There are many ways of generating the same visual effect in a single browser. But how do you know that your page looks the same in other browsers? On other platforms? To people with accessibility options turned on? To automated search engine bots? The only way to be sure is to conform to standards. So what are these standards, why should you follow them, and who creates them?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for setting the standards that Web developers should adhere to. Unfortunately, since these rules are not strictly enforced by most browsers, these “guidelines” take second place behind getting a Web site to look right in the most popular browsers. Getting the desired look the “right” way is just too hard right now, in spite of the fact that the latest versions of those same browsers – IE8 and Firefox 3 – will be demanding higher standards compliance. When you create your ASP.Net Web pages following the W3C standards, your Web pages are bound to be more compatible with devices and browsers that do adhere to these standards.

So what if my site is not compliant?

Failure to comply with these principles can yield very negative aspects such as major search engines failing to index your Web site. Did you know that failure to correctly declare the DOCTYPE of an (X)html Web site can lead to search engines diagnosing your Web pages as 404 (File Not Found Error)? It would certainly be a shame for all the time and effort invested in your site to be wasted in this way. Cases like these are not uncommon; and finding the culprit can be a very daunting task.

Another key point to consider is how compatible your pages are with the variations of Web browsers used. Because of the history of the Web, Web browser programmers spend a great deal of their time writing code that renders legacy (faulty) HTML correctly. This makes it possible for illegal constructs, like misnested tags or incorrect attribute names, to display correctly on a Web page.

Even though browser error handling is consistent, the specifications for error handling are not standard and vary from browser to browser. This means that your Web page can display perfectly fine on Internet Explorer but will render horribly in Firefox due to an error in (X)HTML. Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that your Web page will display correctly on all platforms and browsers, why not make sure your site is valid (X)HTML and leave nothing to chance? Remember, the latest versions of the major browsers – Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 and focusing on implementing standard HTML and CSS correctly.

XHTML Compliance can be Easy with the Right Toolset

If you ask any Web expert on where to start when transitioning your documents to valid XHTML, chances are most will recommend the use of Tidy. Tidy is an open-source program that verifies and corrects the syntax of an XHTML site. While no one can disagree that Tidy is a must-have utility for any serious Web developer, there are some caveats when using it, namely:

• Tidy will not show you the changes it makes before automatically correcting a site;
• Tidy alters, in some way or another, your pages’ indentation;
• Integrating Tidy into Visual Studio requires complicated processes such as running VBScripts and invoking black magic voodoo spells (otherwise Tidy can only be run from the unfriendly command-line)
• Oftentimes Tidy conversions affect the appearance of the whole document, makes it very complicated to keep track of changes.

Aggiorno avoids these problems by showing you exactly what will be changed prior to the conversion. In this way, you only make the changes you want to – and you call the shots at every correction.

Furthermore, Aggiorno’s seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005/2008 allows you to leverage your skills and be up and running with a familiar interface.

As if that wasn’t enough, Aggiorno is flexible enough to let you choose to carry out conversions at the selection, file, or files level. Don’t get us wrong – we love Tidy; but if you think Tidy is great, wait until you try Aggiorno.

Accessibility: Make sure your content can be appreciated by anyone

A USA federal mandate requires that information technology be made accessible to people with disabilities. A great deal of Section 508 fulfillment concerns making Web sites, intranets, and Web-enabled applications accessible. Section 508 compliance has since become a major prerequisite not only in government related software, but also in most enterprise and corporate software solutions. Similar legislation has been passed in many other countries around the world, and many more are in their way to enforce accessibility compliance. Sometimes you are not better off fighting the current.

Whatever the current status of your Web site, you should really focus in making it accessible by anyone. The work involved in reaching this goal depends on how your Web site is structured and programmed. For instance, is there a text equivalent for every non-text element in your site? If not, that’s one task to do. Have you used tables to create the layout of your site? If so, then people with disabilities will not be able to easily navigate your Web site. As specified in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, “layout tables” should be avoided as they may present problems to users of screen readers.

Whether or not creating accessible sites is optional or mandatory, the fact is that every Web page should be accessible to all, especially considering the increasing amount of impaired users that non-accessible sites are missing today. On some occasions, such as when working with intranet and Web Pages from The Federal Government or with a supplier for The Federal Government, it is not optional to have accessible Web Pages – it is the law.

Oftentimes, creating accessible content is incorporated late in the development process. Typically, accessibility evaluation is done by a third-party who finds issues in a late stage of the development process; a phase in which fixing errors can cost a lot more.

A nice side effect of making web pages accessible is that your web is more accessible not only to disabled people, but to everyone else as well. Because your Web site is more usable, you will now be able to target other audiences such as:

• Short-sighted people
• The technically challenged crowd
• The temporarily less able than you (they broke their wrist while snowboarding over the weekend)
• Disabled people due to their age (about 500 million worldwide)

Aggiorno can help your sites in becoming more accessible by assisting you in making sure, for example, that your images have valid text equivalents for those that are needed. Furthermore, Aggiorno can lend a hand in getting rid of all those layout tables by replacing them with CSS elements to make sure layout is independent from the content of a Web page.

If you would like more information on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines please visit the following URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

Abandon Old Ways: Conform to the Web’s Best Practices Separating Content from Presentation: CSS to the Rescue

The Web – an immense source of information. It is very hard to believe that something so vast and powerful was not designed with standards in mind.

A damaging endeavor many designers and developers make is embedding elements of presentation in their documents. Merging style and content compromises core concepts about the portability and accessibility of information on the Web, not to mention making for much larger file sizes and maintenance costs. Not adhering to standards and merging style with content potentially makes content completely inaccessible to certain browsers, devices, and people.

Removing presentation from (X)HTML documents and using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control visual design is an innovative approach for many. Designers, who have been nagged by their clients numerous times about changing the background, or alignment of a menu, will find good reason to separate style from content. By leaving behind the use of <font>, <center> , and <table>to control visual design, designers can have more control over the site’s look and feel. Gone are the days in which developers had to modify the code inside Web pages to change the color or font of a particular header. With CSS, a few simple changes to the style sheet can refresh an entire site comprised of thousands of documents. This approach ensures that everything to do with the look of your site can be found in one place, and is not cluttering up the content of your site.

By following CSS guidelines, you also gain valuable features in your Web Site. For example, the new CSS aware Web pages will most likely be smaller in size since they are now sharing common styles from the same CSS file. This CSS file will be cached once the first page that uses it is loaded. Subsequent pages that use the same CSS file will be able use it immediately; which means an overall improvement in the load time of your Web Site. By having smaller files in your web site, your Web Server will not need to serve the larger files it did before; thus saving you money in bandwidth costs as well as making sure you users receive the requested information in a timely fashion. Last – but definitely not least - Web Spider Bots do a better job of indexing your site when it is not plagued with layout parts. Spider bots also prefer indexing the information at the beginning of the page. With a CSS structured web page, you can place the main information right after the <body> tag and other elements, such as menus, at the bottom of the page without affecting your design.

CSS has quickly become the standard when working with Web pages. Stylesheets solve the problem of mixed content and presentation within the same document. HTML documents can mandate the content structure of the Web page while the CSS describes the presentation style.

If you are ready to jump onto the CSS bandwagon with your existing sites, then you might have a lot of work ahead…unless you use Aggiorno. Aggiorno can extract properties from text snippets or pages and place that information on an external CSS file before you can say “wow”; and you will.

Say What You Mean: Use of Semantic Code

By using semantic code, you are writing in a more meaningful and structured way. By writing semantic code, your Web site will be easier to understand and maintain. Furthermore, it will load faster as all elements of style will reside on a CSS file, which needs to be loaded only once and will most likely be cached.

By adhering to semantic code, you are adhering to standards, which can only make your site easier to work with in the future. Web spiders will index your site easier as they will be able to infer with more accuracy the contents of your page.

Last but not least, by using semantic code, you are making your page more accessible for disabled people. Screen readers will be able to infer in a more reliable manner the way your page is structured if your site is created using semantic tags.

In a nutshell, converting html that is not semantic to semantic code makes your Web pages load faster, easier to maintain, more accessible and easier for search engines to index.