Standards Compliant SharePoint 2010 - Too good to be true??

 

Well it seems not. Microsoft have really pulled out all of the stops this time around, with standards compliant, cross browser compatibility and even accessibility hitting the conference headlines.

 

The first item of note is that SharePoint 2010 aims to be W3C XHTML compliant. This is a massive leap towards making SharePoint 2010 a truly robust platform, worthy of both internet facing sites and global internal systems.

 

I saw a demo of an embedded video in the Monday afternoon Web Content Management  session where a video was streamed from a Document Library (another new SharePoint 2010 feature) and it was loaded in FireFox with no plugins or downloads, full screen streaming and buffering.

 

But the biggest impact is bound to be around the statement that one of the major release goals for the SharePoint 2010 release is that the entire interface of SharePoint 2010 meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance! This includes editing and authoring of content! This is absolutely massive, and represents a huge push from Microsoft to really respond to the community feedback that accessibility is a subject to be taken seriously.

 

Of course, there is bound to be community discussions around the ideology that "compliant" is not the same as "accessible" (which we at Content and Code know all too well, having developed several systems for the RNIB) but this is still a massive step forward and certainly shows a continuing respect of standards from Microsoft and good news for the future of compliant software.