my vote is for xhtml and css usage. if the site was as tableless as possible (i know things like calendar would be hard/impossible to do this with), it would help a lot... you can do so much with just divs lists and paragraphs, which incidentally move over to handhelds/brail very well. now that many people are using list builder, ad_form, etc. these things are improving (since they all use the same css file and if you want to edit the look/feel it can be done in one place), . I think it would be good to have some site wide standards that can be used by any packaged, for example, the a href class=button works throughout the site, if we also had just as an example
<div class="package-nav">
<ul>
<li><a href="">Page 1</a></li>
<li><a href="">Page 2</a></li>
<li><a href="">Page 3</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
available to all packages that use a top nav bar (logger, package manager, bug tracker, etc. come to mind). Then people could choose to have these links look however they want - it could event become a floating left nav pod if they wanted. From what i've seen openacs only has a few functionally different UI elements.
- lists (continued listbuilder integration will make editing it site wide easy)
- forms (this is already standardized for the most part)
- calendars (the css files in calendar would be a good place to standardize on these, as far as i can tell this and lists should be the only places on any site that use tables - i.e. navigation should use lists not tables)
- vertical lists of content - by this i mean things that listbuilder isn't good at, like forums, gc, etc.
- packaged based navigation (with my example above).
If we had a spec doc and a standardized way of dealing with these 5 UI elements (and any that i haven't thought of) i think that editing a handfull of css files would be pretty manageable for any project. I know that would make my life easier, since I've done just this all too many times in the past...
