Estados Unidos em direção ao Linux - OpenSource

I wish that the White House web site would conform with the open standards that are recognized for web documents. It is not enough to include the doctype declaration in the HTML that claims that the page is XHTML + RDFa, but there must be follow through to actually realized the goal. Any tools that are used, whether free or not, should be good enough to put out good code. I've personally used Plone which is also costs nothing and has open code that can be examined and changed. But Plone, understanding it is not perfect, at least by default produces code that conforms with the open standards it claims to.

As I went through and used the W3C validator Tool on pages (for example: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.... ), I found invalid XHTML + RDFa. It would also then more easily reach the accessibility guidelines (WAI and Section 508). Also the data contained in the web pages could be machine processable as well as being human readable (the more truthful the doctype declaration, the easier for the data to be consumed by standards compliant software).

I applaud the White House trying to make positive steps forward in terms of transparency. I just hope that they can also put in steps to ensure that the data and documents published conform with the standards they claim to want to abide by.

For more information:
http://www.w3.org/TR/gov-data/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://www.validsites.org/

Daniel Bennett