Scott Guthrie on Web Standards

I want to make sure Scott Guthrie’s latest interview at Channel 9 doesn’t go unnoticed. Scott goes over some of the features geared toward web standards and accessibility. This is much needed information for people on both sides of the fence. Go watch it and learn what Visual Studio.NET 2005 will have to offer in terms of web standards.

Below are some of the key points (relevant to the topic of this post) Scott makes:

1. IIS is not needed to code web applications. There’s a stand-alone web server instead.
2. When a web page is created from a canned template, it complies to XHTML Transitional right out of the box.
3. IntelliSense is pretty darn good at picking up (X)HTML and DOM properties in the HTML designer.
4. New feature: Tag Navigator. This is pretty much exactly as in Macromedia Dreamweaver. Basically, your position in an HTML file is displayed in a flattened representation on the bottom of the screen. You can see the entire tag nesting chain. You click an element, and its enclosed markup is highlighted in the designer.
5. Bug fix: HTML Source Preservation. Scott doesn’t think code mangling when switching between the Designer and HTML views is a bug. I do. Anyway, I guess not messing with your markup has a name now—HTML Source Preservation.
6. Code formatting. I didn’t catch it if this feature had an official name, but it’s similar to (again) Dreamweaver’s Source Formatting and Clean Up XHTML. In a nutshell, you can take a chunk of HTML you inherited from someone else and reformat it to your liking, making elements lower case, setting your own indents, etc.
7. A built-in accessibility checker. Now, this is a very helpful feature! You choose between Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and U.S. Section 508 Guidelines.

Let me say again: this is by far not an exhaustive list of features in the upcoming version of VS.NET 2005. Watch the video and learn about some much anticipated changed on the compiler front.

As a side note, it’s funny how Robert [Scoble] who tapes this video says at the beginning, “Since I’m having all these arguments with The Web Standards Project team guys…” :)