Hi people,
last week an absolutely fabulous gathering happened: Plone Symposium Midwest, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA.
Much happened there, which you will read about in various other places. Especially, we also did some good work on accessibility. I’ll post much more on this in the coming weeks; stay posted.
One thing I want to stress today to the Plone community: we have been using the HTML tags of <dt> and <dd> for a lot of stuff. Most notably portlets.
This is wrong. Let me repeat this: this is wrong. You should only be using <dt> and consorts if it is actually semantically correct. That means: you can use it if it is actually a definition list. You should not be using this for display purposes. Like, really not. No. Just don’t. Bunnies and kittens will die in vain when you do this. We love bunnies and kittens, and they should thrive. Trust me on this one.
We will change the whole portlet templates in the future. As many people are basing their own templates off of the standard ones, we won’t do this in the Plone 4.x series, so we won’t break your stuff unexpectedly, but we will do it in the future.
So please. If you want to future-proof your portlets: use something else. Use a header tag for the header, and use <ul> <li> for the content. Tack classes onto it so the design people can make it beautiful.
Just don’t use <dt> and friends, unless your portlet is actually, semantically, really, seriously, and I mean this, an explanation of a term.
If you’re using it just to tack some CSS onto it, change your ways. Please, pretty please, with whipped cream on top. It will make our compliance with accessibility rules around the globe much easier.
Thank you.
Paul