Joomla: far away from Web Standards

Joomla is a well known CMS which emerged from Mambo CMS. Both systems focus on an easy way of creating web communities and not only. However, after the separation into two different platforms the developers of Joomla seem to be more active than the Mambo ones.

Currently the cores of the two systems look alike in certain cases, but all indications show that that the following versions of Joomla will be more advanced, easier to be developed and maintained. Among the priorities of the management team is how to develop the usability of Joomla. Recently, some hot developers presented a tableless version of Joomla which follows the Web Standards rules.

Alas most of the effort is focused on how the frontpage of a system will include no tables, how the whole style of it will be defined by a CSS file etc. What happens next? Since Joomla is still based on Mambo CMS it becomes impossible to apply Standards in the inside pages. As a result most of the inner pages hold numerous tables, a vast number of different inline styles and many times all these styles confront each other in 3rd party components and modules.

There is no doubt that the core development team will present to the community a tableless, solid and clean cut version of Joomla, according to W3C specifications. Probably soon. This will be a fair step to the right direction. However the power of such a popular platform relies on the 3rd party developers. These people ought to change their way of working. There are many of them and some have provided us great tools. It is clear that when a component is fully tested by thousands of people and it is proven to work well it is very difficult to convince a developer to re-built it from scratch. But there doesn’t seem to be an alternative.