[TYPO3-UG US] OT: Forms, accessibility (was Drupal vs. TYPO3)

[Christopher Torgalson]

Hi there,

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:23 PM, virgil huston <virgil.huston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Christopher,
>
> Can you explain more what you mean by TYPO3's weaknesses in Forms and
> Backend? The BE seems very accessible to me, so I don't understand what the
> problem is.

I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that, in terms of web
accessibility, TYPO3's BE is a complete failure. I don't see how,
short of a complete rewrite, it could possibly be made to comply with
any government's or standards organization's accessibility
requirements (e.g. section 508, WAI etc). Drupal's, admin areas by
comparison could be made highly accessible with a comparatively small
effort (i.e. without rewriting the application from scratch...it'd
still be a lot of work, depending on the level of accessibility
required). In some ways I suspect (though I haven't studied the output
closely) that Drupal 6 has made some steps backward with its increased
reliance on javascript...

With respect to forms, I'm speaking of the incredibly, fantastically,
unbelievably, spectacularly, shockingly, amazingly inefficient
templating method used in extensions such as sr feuser register (it's
not the fault of this extension, and I don't mean to single it
out--it's just the extension I need to use most often that uses this
method of templating...) and others where, if a project requires that
templates be customized, you must rewrite multiple versions of the
same forms. The template file tx_srfeuserregister_pi1_css_tmpl.html
used by sr feuser register is 3198 lines long. Keep in mind it
contains NOTHING but html. The effort required to fully customize this
file is simply unbelievable.

Drupal, on the other hand, has a reasonably robust forms API which
makes the development of modules with forms fairly straightforward.
More to the point, Drupal's theming system makes it possibly to change
the rendering of some or all forms in a much more generic way (i.e.
without the need to customize each state of each form in every
application).

TYPO3 extensions can work in essentially the same way of
course--instead of using html templates, it's just necessary to use TS
templates using FORM and other cObjects. So in this way, it's less a
limitation of TYPO3 as such than it is a limitation of several of the
currently available tools that must be used with TYPO3 (i.e. in use
cases such as user registration which are not handled by the core
itself).

-- 
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/