Something that has been bugging me I should mention. In the design implimentation phase of our internet project I had to do a bit of under the bonnet work to prove to the Applications Team that we could impliment the design that we had developed. I made a few mock ups using CSS layout techniques where I was able to recreate the design exactly as we had built it in Photoshop. The apps team said it wouldn’t work and that SharePoint was a dynamic… blah blah blah. I downloaded a copy of SharePoint Designer, requested access to the test site and plugged in to see what I could make of it. To my horror I saw masses and masses of nested within nested tables everywhere. Yup, even at the end of the first decade of this new millinium, the code gurus over at Microsoft are relying on nested tables to layout their webpages and widgets. As usual, MS and web standards are NOT getting along.
I tooled around for a few days wrestling with SP Designer trying to see if I could convert the master.page and associated includes into CSS layouts. I even scouted around blogs to find if anyone else had tried or had any luck with this. I even thought for a while that I might be the first person to crack a CSS layout. It soon became apparent that the incredibly complicated nature of SharePoint would probably take a PHD to locate every layout table and convert into some CSS.
I haven’t addressed the issues of accessibility. I guess these are compromises you make when you are supplied a webhosting platform free because you have an educational software agreement with Microsoft. Now if only Adobe could come up with and alternative. I’m sure it would be standards based. The Applications Team in IT loved saying “SharePoint does this, Contribute doesn’t” in early meetings. It seemed useles to point out that Contribute did so most things.