Compliancy - W3C Style

09/12/2005 11:22 AM by Chris Toohey

As I stated earlier, still working on the design...

With that in mind, I've turned to making sure that my entire site is W3C compliant, for HTML4.01, CSS, and by the end of the week the XML/RSS Feeds. That being said, I failed in making my site completely compliant by using ? in the query string for Domino URL Commands (ie., categories%3FOpenView%26RestrictToCategory=publishing%26count=10). While this is not the worse thing that could ever happen in the world, it did remind me that I needed to do something! Ya gotta love a reminder that presents itself as something blowing up!

I needed to modify the NOTES.INI at the server level and set the following:

This allows me to use "!" as an alternate query component separator. Once this change takes effect and I have the time, I'll go back and make sure that the site validates for HTML4.01, as it already does for CSS.

And speaking of validation, that's one of the reason's that I'm holding off on searching part of the site. While I'd really love to use Domino's built-in functionality (ie, the Domino URL Command ?searchview), it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that I cannot completely control the output. By this, I mean that the $$SearchTemplate for the view that I'm searching's form attributes must remain Notes-based - meaning that I cannot use the treat contents as HTML flag or use Other and specify my own content type. That really sucks, to say the least.

Due to this, I've taken to the approach of doing this via a ls-based agent. It's more overhead, but I can return the results how I want them to be returned. I may just have a trick up my sleeve for this very thing to make it work very nicely... but more on that when I actually get to that point!