Sharepoint 2007: Bad markup in default themes

Today I installed a Windows 2003 Server with SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on a computer in the office. There are many companies looking for development services for Sharepoint so I'm aiming to gain some experience in this field.

Just before a year I had a really bad experience in modifying the markup and CSS styles of the default theme of Sharepoint 2003. The thing I remember is tht the markup was really awful, with more than 20 HTML tables nested in one another, which was making it really huge. The same layout appearacne could be achieved with times less HTML code. I'm a big fan of layouts without tables, based on div tags and CSS styles which are compatible with the latest W3C standards. But infact I have nothing against tables when they are used with reason.

...so the first thing I did after installing and updating everything and after attaching Sharepoint to the database was the markup. I just made a right click on the Central Administration portal home page in my Internet Explorer and looked at the markup. A nice surprise :) There were only a few tables left in comparision with the 2003 default themes. I scrolled down. Oh, my God..... some of the tags are with capital letters, OK, no problem, some old HTML standards allow upper case tags. So I just copied all the markup and pasted it in the W3C Markup Validator. God damn, the result was worse than I expected, there were 169 errors. After that I noticed that even the document type definition was missing...

It is just ridiculous. This product costs so much money (check out the prices yourself) and Microsoft did not even made the default themes compatible with the latest standards. So if you want valid XHTML markup you just must create themes yourself or pay money for that. I just can not believe that such things happen with products from a company like Microsoft. And may be it's all my fault, if I didn't know anything about standards I wouldn't notice the bad markup...

About this blog

I created this blog inspired by the numerous bugs in the representation of the markup and CSS styles, the execution of JavaScript and many other ridiculous things in FireFox which the web developer is facing when doing his/her job. There are many people telling me how good this application was without having a single idea what web development is and what difficulties have the people creating the web sites when adjusting things to run under most used browsers. I'm really angry with such people who are telling me what to use and what is better without really knowing what are they using and without having an idea what makes the chosen program better or worse than others.

The purpose of this blog is not to tell you which applications are better and which worse. I'm aiming to focus on bugs, issues and disadvantages in different software which people use in the process of web development: browsers, development environments, server software, and whatever you can think of. I'll try to make comparision between software providing similar features while focusing on the things that makes the work of the web developer a real nightmare. And the real benefit from this blog will come if we can together find solutions for problems caused by these bugs and issues.