The context of these suggestions is Notes Rich-Text in document, forms and pages. XPages are not considered in this text.
We need to be able to produce valid HTML5 with Domino Forms, Views, Pages and so on. Please make valid HTML5 a success criteria!
The default doctype should be changed to HTML5's <!DOCTYPE html>, but still override-able in $$HTMLFrontMatter.
Remove the language and type attributes, from the script tag generated for form, subform and page JS headers. They are no longer required.
Given that CSS is responsible for the layout and look & feel, Domino must stop rendering HTML with presentational markup.
Drop the text, bgcolor, link, alink and vlink attributes on the body tag.
Drop the type attribute on ul and ol tags, rendered from Notes Rich-text.
Mark up buttons as button tags. No more <input type="submit"> nor <input type="button">. This makes styling easier and makes semantic sense.
Remove table attributes: border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0", it is up to the application developer to make the CSS.
Leave empty table cells empty. No more <img width="1" height="1" src="/icons/ecblank.gif" border="0" alt="">.
The hr tag should no longer generate width, size and align attributes. A simple <hr> will do.
Indented RichText is rendered as a ul tag, but without any li tags inside, which is invalid. It would make more sense to mark it up with blockquote tags.
This bug also exist inside nested lists, if the list items have a too big left margin.
All these changes will reduce the number of errors and warnings, when validating Dominos HTML output, on
W3C's HTML validator.
It saddens me to see this forum doesn't even have a web-server category, for suggestions.
More to clean up:
When inserting a picture in a rich-text field, the HTML generated has no
altattribute, if the alternate text field on picture properties is empty. But thealtattribute is required in the HTML specs.If a link hotspot is created around a picture, and "Show border around hotspot" is not checked, then the picture inside the hotspot will render to an
imgtag with aborder="0", which is also obsolite.Another suggestion: Use
detailsandsummarytags for collapsible sections.See this Codepen for a demo.
True, these old-fashioned, early 2000's tags are often influencing coding.
However, as there are lots of old applications out there, that rely on these tags, I recommend a flag to enable or disable this behaviour ("use legacy tags", or so).
Great suggestion!!! That old fashion, 15 years old-style of HTML generation causes a lot of issues.
Awesome suggestions. I fully agree with all of them.
Theo