Having hit this problem for a client site I’m working on, I decided to come up with a solution for it. In its current unpolished form, the Dynalinks plugin parses link tags as the page is constructed, so links will always be up to date. As for the unpolished part, it currently requires text to be inserted manually as so:

1. [link:14"]click here[/link]

This format will always provide a current link to the page with ID 14, no matter where it’s moved to in the site.

The plan is to extend this with a TinyMCE button to make inserting links easier without having to look up a page ID. Possibly down the line it may include dependency tracking, so a page can’t be deleted when it’s linked to, but maybe this is a bit overkill.

Update:

The script’s had a bit of an update so it now works with the URL ‘link:[page_id]‘, to fit in more with the editor and ease of use for non-techies. This also means it doesn’t need its own TinyMCE button.

Grab the plugin over at its project page.

I’ve spent far too long on this so far, but it’s been a learning experience, being my first delve into WordPress plugin development.

The planned feature list is: (probably a bit ambitious)

• Images grouped into albums
• Automatic retrieval of EXIF information
• Tagging and comments system separate from main WordPress data
• View tracking
• Bulk uploading with zip files
• Online image editing, including rotation and cropping. Possibly other features, once I look into GD’s capabilities
• Full integration into WordPress frontend, with template tags and content tags
• Added buttons in TinyMCE for inserting tags
• Optional use of mod_rewrite for tidy URLs

How many of these features will make it into the v1.0 release is debatable, but I intend to get them all working over time.

• Upload the sin city art in design

I’m sure there’ll be more, but that’s a daunting enough list to get started on for now!

Semantic Markup

There are numerous advantages to using accessible, semantic markup when creating web documents. As the term suggests, this technique allows content to be more accessible to a wider variety of people, through the increasing use of assistive technologies such as screen readers. When a document is structured semantically, the task of representing this to different audiences becomes much easier.

While semantic markup and the semantic web are separate concepts, the adoption of these technologies by the wider community can be seen as comparable. Both require additional effort on the part of the page author, and advantages can be seen in both cases.

Despite the accessibility benefits of using semantic markup, and this now being a legal requirement for any organisation offering a service to the public, a recent BBC report found that the majority of leading websites still fail to meet basic accessibility requirements.

So why are so few sites accessible? For many, other than accessibility advocates, there is no reason to put in the extra effort involved. Unlike with conventional programming languages, web browsers will consistently display syntactically invalid markup, giving them no reason to learn the ‘proper’ way. In addition to this, WYSIWYG editors often output invalid or inaccessible code, as it is difficult to add semantics to the page without a knowledge of context.

The W3C’s Loss of Control

There is also a perceived lack of faith in the W3C, who originally set out to establish standards for web markup. Official specifications have become stagnant in recent years, with the last major revision being XHTML 1.0, published in 2000. The draft XHTML 1.1 specification was released shortly afterwards, but 6 years later a final version has still not been published. In contrast, unofficial developments and proprietary technologies have experienced prolific growth and adoption.

Javascript (officially ECMAScript), RSS (and also the Podcasting extension), Flash, Pingbacks, and more recently microformats are all unofficial/proprietary developments which have experienced near-universal adoption. Flash has arguably become the new standard for embedded media in web pages, due to its cross platform compatibility and non-reliance on video codecs. In the time since the last revision to the official XHTML specification, Flash has received 5 major updates. While this technology is inherently inaccessible, it represents the speed of web developments outside the W3C.

RSS was originally developed by Netscape (as with Javascript), but now has 3 branches in development: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM. Despite its name, RSS 2.0 is a separate development branch which ignores the official RDF specification (unlike RSS 1.0), and instead uses simple XML without the concept of DTDs. This, like Flash, has become a universal mechanism without the support of the W3C.

I’ll post the rest of the article here in a few weeks when I won’t get done for plagiarism or something..

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