Summary.
The Project Seven Glide Panel Magic widget meets any
level of Web standards and best practice technical
specification and consideration.
Its CSS
based design is highly configurable that enables
the widget to accommodate any sound HTML design. Multiple
widgets can exist on the same content page. The widget's menu
structure can be horizontal or vertical and can be located
separate from the content that the widget controls. The CSS
degrades gracefully in older browsers. It can be adjusted
to accommodate and/or coexist with external style sheets that
control primary content for all devices that support CSS
and supported CSS media types.
The JavaScript is clean and succinct. For devices and user
agents that do not support JavaScript or for Web visitors who
disable JavaScript, the widget content is highly structured
and usable.
It is how and in the manner which the JavaScript for this
widget has been coded that allows the JavaScript to impact
the DOM of
any modern Web browser regardless of the Web page's
recognized MIME type. It further allows the script to make
the required adjustments to the DOM prior to the Web page
being parsed. This allows the content page to successfully
render within the browser for either of the MIME types of
text/html or application/xhtml+xml.
True XHTML.
True XHTML content that is delivered with a MIME
content–type of application/xhtml+xml is
problematic because Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser
does not support the application/xhtml+xml
MIME type.
The beauty of this Project Seven widget is that it does
support true XHTML and allows for its use within frameworks,
such as .NET, that use content negotiation to deliver the
appropriate MIME type to a specific browser. For Internet
Explorer browser, content is delivered to it in
text/html. For other modern browsers, it is
delivered as application/xhtml+xml and is,
subsequently, parsed as xml.
This Project Seven widget can be used in ASP.NET Web
applications. Please understand that this particular version
of the widget is still in beta tests. However, based upon
my tests and evaluations within ASP.NET, this widget functions
flawlessly within all modern browsers.
ASP.NET and Custom DTD Considerations.
When using a custom DTD within ASP.NET certain changes
within a developer's code style must be taken into
consideration and modified, if necessary.
Entity Encoding.
Traditionally, many developers use HTML Friendly entities
within their code. However, when using custom DTDs these
entities should be replaced with Unicode [Numeric Character
References, NCR] values.
The widget automatically generates several HTML Friendly
entities when used within Adobe's Dreamweaver. These entities,
along will all entities, will need converted to the NCR
format.
Specific Custom DTD Issues.
Specific additional issues that a developer may encounter
within use of custom DTDs within ASP.NET are covered within
the next two links.
Accessibility.
Content and developer skill dependent, this widget meets
all levels of the WCAG
version 1.0 as published by the W3C As I said,
it meets all levels: Priority One, Priority Two and
Priority Three. This includes the United States Americans
with Disabilities Act Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines.
This content page has been machine validated against the
WCAG 1.0 standard using Hiawatha's AccVerify and Watchfire's
WebXact products. No errors are reported at Priority 1,
Priority 2 or Priority 3 levels.
SEO
Performance.
The content within the widget is exposed fully to search
engines provided that the specific content is not excluded by
technique, e.g. robot text file exclusion.
This ability is superior over standard AJAX techniques
that are used to present content within a collapsible content
‘fold’.
Exposing content to search engines and having the content
conveniently available to users via ‘click through’
of the search engine link are distinct and separate issues.
The Web developer must be cognizant of these issues. Specific
technique and suggestions are provided within the Application Test content page of
this Web site and address these issues.