Conforming to Standards

Conforming to Standards

The e-commerce application is standards friendly. It was written to conform to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. You'll notice that the footer includes an icon from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that indicates that the website has successfully passed their XHTML 1.0 Transitional validator (see Figure 34.9).

You can validate any page against the W3C validator by visiting http://validator.w3.org.

The e-commerce application does not use HTML tables for layout. All page layout is performed with Cascading Style Sheets. For example, the Store.master Master Page contains three <div> tags that represent the three page columns. The three columns are laid out from left to right with the following three CSS classes:

.leftColumn
{
    float:left;
    width:100px;
    padding:5px;
}

.middleColumn

{
    float:left;
    width:450px;
    border-left:solid 1px blue;
    padding:8px;
}

.rightColumn
{
    float:right;
    width:200px;
    border-left:solid 1px blue;
    border-bottom:solid 1px blue;
    padding:5px;
}

<asp:Label
  id="lblName"
  Text="Name:"
  AssociatedControlID="txtName"
  Runat="server" />

<asp:TextBox
  id="txtName"
  Text='<%# Bind("Name") %>'
  Runat="server" />

Summary

The e-commerce application illustrates many of the new features of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. First, it illustrates how you can take advantage of Master Pages and Themes when designing your website. The e-commerce application takes advantage of both technologies to make it easy for you to change the appearance of the website.

The e-commerce application also takes advantage of the new Navigation controls and Site Map infrastructure included in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. The application uses TReeView , Menu , and SiteMapPath controls. These controls are bound to Site Map data retrieved from either the standard XmlSiteMapProvider or the custom CategorySiteMapProvider .

The e-commerce application also takes advantage of the new performance-enhancing features of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. The application uses Polling SQL Cache Dependencies to cache product and category data in memory just as long as the data does not change in the database.

Finally, the e-commerce application conforms to W3C standards such as XHTML and accessibility standards. The entire website validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.