How compatible is Domino 6 with HTML4, CSS, etc. standards?

How compatible is Domino 6 with HTML4, CSS, etc. standards?

We use Domino R5 mainly for internal Web sites and we've been trying to make our sites conform to various protocols and recommendations, partly because of disability legislation and partly because we've been asked to put CSS, HTML4, "W3C approved," "WAI AA," etc. logos on the site. There are several problems unique to R5 (I hope). Can you tell me if Domino 6.x is able to conform with these standards?

For example in R5:

  • You can't specify doctype at all or use HTML attributes (e.g., [HTML LANG="en"]).

  • Some HTML validator tools don't like ampersands in ACTION attributes or empty action attributes, both of which R5 generates frequently (e.g., [FORM METHOD=post ACTION="/CELTWeb.nsf/$$search?OpenForm&Seq=1" NAME="_DominoForm"]) because the ampersand character was not properly encoded as the entity "&."

  • Body text color and background color on forms and pages can't be given the # prefix required by validators (e.g., [BODY TEXT="000000" BGCOLOR="FFFFFF"]).

  • In R5 there's no place to put "<NoScript>this page requires JavaScript</NoScript>." I know you can use pages for JavaScript, but then they get the text/HTML MIME type, which is wrong for JavaScript & CSS.

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ND6 has addressed many of these issues, though not all. It has resolved the issues with ampersands in its URLs -- those are now functioning as you would hope.

There is a new StyleSheet design element that allows you to define and reference a style sheet from within the application. It is functional in both Notes and Web clients at runtime.

Forms and pages have a JSHeader that gives you a place to put JS code, and there is also a new JavaScript library design element that can be referenced in the JSHeader to apply to the entire page.

Doctype specification is not in 6. We are investigating the best way to approach this for the next major release.

Another new option in 6 that I believe will help you is the ability to specify the "Content type" as either Notes or Web (as you could in 5), but we added a new option -- "Other" -- that allows you to supply your own content type. You can also specify the character set here.

This was first published in July 2003

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