Design Goals

When it comes to the website design and development, there's far too much software tools that can be used; but none of them satisfied our design goals:

  • Web Standards compliant web pages based on XML

  • Accessibility and usability

  • Easy maintenance

We crafted SilkPage, having the above design goals in mind. SilkPage output web pages meet the above requirements.

Valid Code

SilkPage output markup is validated XHTML. No legacy XHTML such as nested layout tables and font tags, the page size is reduced dramatically and the source code is easier to read and faster to load. At the back-end, SilkPage uses DocBook Website Types together with XSL stylesheets to produce customized XHTML content. Web Standards compliant web pages.

Stylesheets Use

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to separate presentation from content. SilkPage makes use of CSS stylesheets by applying its CSS themes. Look and feel of the site can be changed by simply applying a new CSS theme. Ease of maintenance.

Accessibility

To serve people with visual or mobile impairments, SilkPage follows accessibility guidelines closely:

  • Style sheets rather than deprecated markup like are used to present content.

  • SilkPage generates markup that is structural and meaningful.

  • Generated markup is not presented by graphics, graphics are not necessary to understand the main content.

  • The main navigation menu is short and tab based, all main content is provided near the top of the document.

  • Text equivalents are provided for every non-text element (e.g., using "alt")