ModX site won't validate Strict

Personally, I tend to exert professional expertise on this. The reason most people still use target="_blank" is because they are still under the mistaken notion that you should not open external links in the same window because they will lose users.

I would argue that the decision should have been whether to include the link at all. It was a tactic of business owners who posted content that noone cared about. If the user doesn’t move closer to solving their problem at each step they will leave no matter what form the links take. If the content was indeed what they were looking for they will come back. If you walk into a store and you don’t find what you are looking for you go elsewhere no matter what else they have going on.

The fact of the matter is that if you send a visitor through to their goal they will be happy. If on your site they don’t find a solution they won’t buy anyway so what does it matter if they stay on the main page or not. The idea of the website should be to convert the right visitors into customers, customers into friends and friends into referrers. For those who are not the right visitors they can go wherever they want and leave whenever they want.

Many people who open links in new windows--especially users who browse at full screen in IE--often don’t notice the new window opening and then become frustrated when the back button doesn’t work and then close the browser windows thinking they did something wrong or that the site is somehow broken. (There are numerous studies from as early as the mid 90’s and as late as around 2003 to reinforce this user data.)

I have on occasion used unobtrusive JS to handle this and if users have JS off they will just get a normal link but I will not use target="_blank" if a client is asking for it, I will ask why, educate or eliminate.

Cheers,

Jay

I agree with your rationale 100%, and have likewise made those exact same points. At the end of the day though the revenues involved with and profile of some sites don’t justify a frequently protracted education.

At least for me there are very much occasions when idealism is trumped by practical reality and having to put food on the table.

And, I can be a pragmatist in other areas. I won’t hesitate to step off the standards wonks dogma if it gets results or improves user experience.

The one point that I failed to mention is that if I discuss the project with the client on their desired outcomes and that results are results and that by taking any actions that would directly increase the effectiveness or revenue of a site should be implemented and, therefore, it doesn’t make sense to implement those things that could harm or decrease said outcomes.

If the client or a researcher can prove that target="_blank" would make it more likely that users would convert to the desired outcome, I’d be advocating its use regardless of the W3C spec in a heartbeat.

Cheers,

Jay

[Now off to rid the world of dropdown menus masquerading bad IA as a feature that all sites should have.]

When Liz stops wanting to shop at fancy places I’ll step up for more protracted educational sessions to debunk categorical statements made by clients’ nephews. Meta keywords belongs right up there with drop-down navigation IMO, too.

I totally agree (and appreciate!) that there are many clients that just want it done and hire/trust us explicitly to just do what they want. For them it’s done right, though we do tend to use XHTML Strict because it typically involves some fluff from Ajax libraries like jQuery or Mootools. Those tend to break in odd ways for HTML doctypes, ergo cést la vie.

See, we ARE on the same page. *grumble* (meta kewords, dropdowns, auto-started audio, mystery-meat-navigation, and splash pages).

Again, it is about pragmatism often for me, the conversation is about 30 seconds long at the most. I ask "what is your goal, to make money with your site?" if they answer yes, then I don’t revisit it and just leave out the crap.

The big area that would creat potential problems in any CMS built site is the RTE and the availability of the _blank value causing otherwise valid XHTML sites to fail. If there was a good alternative we would be set. I understand that it is a desired feature for HTML5 so who knows...

Cheers and all the best,

Jay

Hello,

If you uninstall quickedit that should eliminate 3 of the 4 errors. The 4th error is this bit:



I think that is tied in with the gallery, but I can’t say for sure.

On a side note nice design.

AMDbuilder

Quote from: AMDbuilder at Mar 10, 2008, 08:27 PM

Hello,

If you uninstall quickedit that should eliminate 3 of the 4 errors. The 4th error is this bit:

<ul class="thumbs"></ul>

I think that is tied in with the gallery, but I can’t say for sure.

On a side note nice design.

AMDbuilder

Thanks, this is what I was looking for. I am trying to hack QuickEdit now, but can’t get it to work.

On line 69-70 in output.class.inc.php I have changed this:



to this



But it makes no difference?

Edit -> Sorry, it worked if I cleared the cache. However the quickedit functions don’t display when formatted as: <quickedit:contentarea> as opposed to <quickedit:contentarea />. Any ideas?

Edit2 -> This is a classic example of not reading the error: "element "QUICKEDIT:TAGLINE" undefined"

Is there no way to make the Quickedit functions validate based on the fact that they are an undefined element?

That is correct. That is a custom tag for QuickEdit, and it won’t validate... unless you want to make your own xsl validation file. However, this won’t show unless you are logged in to the Manager. Make sure you clear the cache last thing before you log out, though, or they’ll still be in the cached document.

Quote from: sottwell at Mar 11, 2008, 08:38 AM

That is correct. That is a custom tag for QuickEdit, and it won’t validate... unless you want to make your own xsl validation file. However, this won’t show unless you are logged in to the Manager. Make sure you clear the cache last thing before you log out, though, or they’ll still be in the cached document.

This does still show when not logged into the manager, else the W3C wouldn’t invalidate it.

Do you know why this is?

Seeing as how you need to login to manager to use quick edit what’s the point in keeping it? Sure you can be browsing your site as you edit it, but I have found that just keeping the site open in a tab and refreshing the page once I save changes works just as well.

I normally remove quickedit after I do an install for this reason, that and less is more right?

AMDbuilder