Compliant rebuild? - Cover me I'm goin' in

[DiegoFuego]

Hi all,

I'm messing around with Actinic Developer Lite with a view to deploying a shop for one of our clients. It looks perfect for their admin requirements - but having spent the last couple of years striving to code all my sites in compliant CSS/XHTML I'm less than impressed with the archaic table based layout and copious use of deprecated tags in the default templates.

I'm not an anti-table zealot - they have their time and place - but I feel that much could be done to improve on the templates as supplied. So my point is this - do I have a hope in hell of producing a really nice shop in CSS/XHTML or am I opening myself up to a nightmare of nested template editing? So far I've had a good look around and it seems the further you go into it the more template fragments need to be edited.

I'm hoping some of you more experienced devs might be able to give me some general tips or share any CSS/XHTML experiences?

Cheers!

Edit: I've been playing with the Dreamweaver extension already and it seems quite handy.

[jont]

do I have a hope in hell of producing a really nice shop in CSS/XHTML

Yes but with a steep learning curve

am I opening myself up to a nightmare of nested template editing?

Yes - see above

Try a search on CSS / W3C on the forum as quite a few of us have managed to make life better BUT it will never be 100% due to the Actinic code required for the cart areas etc ... W3C will not recognise the proprietary code

There is a CSS theme created by one of the mods (Chris I recall) which is a starter for 10

[DiegoFuego]

Thanks Jont

Thanks - don't suppose you have any links handy to live sites using CSS/XHTML?

[gabrielcrowe]

seems this is a common thing

i nearly got there, and i'v broken the .pl many times trying to edit away those pesky <actinc:gubbins> tags.

i gave up to a certain extent and simply let the code be broken.

/me weeps into his coffee.

[DiegoFuego]

Mmm. Having read a bit more around here it looks like I'll settle for 1.0 transitional and live with the unavoidable Actinic proprietary tags not validating then. Can either of you guys give me a clue as to what percentage of the templates I'll need to edit to eliminate most of the tables where they are used for layout? Is there a best approach? Thanks for your help so far

[NormanRouxel]

The Primary templates for products and sections don't really rely on any tables other than the ones mentioned below.

The main areas where Actinic relies on tables is within Act_ProductBody.html:-

1) The Section Link area:

NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONLISTTOP and NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONLISTBOTTOM

these use tables generated by the Actinic executable so are going to be hard to fix.


2) Product and Fragment layouts:

Act_ProductBody.html also generates the 3 column table that products live in (via NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTBULK).

Then each Act_ProductLine.html (there are several variations of product layouts available) sets a row, or rows, for this table.

This is an area where a CSS layout can be easily applied.

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The Search, Cart and Checkout may need careful looking at as well and are not discussed above.

[DiegoFuego]

Thanks a lot Norman, thats a very handy synopsis of what's involved. Wish me luck...