Actinic, CSS and Web Access Standards

[AppleSound]

I am very keen on designing my websites to follow the WCAG standards and am about to take on a new project using Actinic.

I am considering attempting to rewrite the templates using CSS for layout.

Is it worth my while or am I doomed to failure?

I believe I can rewrite the Act_Primary and Act_Product_Line pages quite easily but I am worried about the pages that are generated by Perl scripts.

Any thoughts would be welcome.

Nick

[sametch]

Nick

I have spent many hours trying to do similar, my desire was as a minimum a site which is validated xhtml and ideally a 90% CSS tableless design along the lines of cubecart.

Sadly I have not managed to succeed.

Modifying the templates is the easy bit, but there appears to be some code snippets that don't appear to be open to modify (they appear to come from within actinic itself).

I would love to hear from anyone who has succeeded at this or alternatively anyone who knows a way to use Actinic just for the cart facility to integrate with pages that are seperaately generated.

sametch

[cdicken]

Hi there - I posted a message in the Developers forum a year ago about this. Yo may not have access to this forum so here are the details....

Currently I am working on some new-style themes for future releases of Actinic, and I set myself the challenge of creating a clean layout that didn't use any <table> code except where it was absolutely necessary.

I have pretty much succeeded, and the results are available as a Theme Snapshot at the following location:

http://www.actinic.co.uk/v7/css_theme.acd

As you will see, I kept tables for the shopping cart and the checkout fields as they were a better solution than divs. I also had to create three different stylesheets - for pages, pop-ups and for the receipt.

Anyway, I will now go on and create some proper designs, but I thought you lot might appreciate getting access to an alternative set of templates for basing a design on.

Please note: The theme will just look like a standard Clean Layout - don't get too excited Also, it has not been rigourously tested like released themes - although I can't find any problems in the testing I've done - but nevertheless please treat it like beta software (i.e. don't run your business on it unless you are sure it is working 100%).

Hope that's of use.