More on accessibility and CMS

[iambaz]

Hi,

I have been building sites using my own custom made CMS for a while now. Although the sites content is generally accessible, the pages will not pass the accessibility tests due to the parsing of variables in the header eg showpage.php?id=453 and also in the links

Doesn anybody know how the larger sites and their cms systems combat this problem? Someone has suggestes mod-rewrite is the answer? Are there any other ways?

Thanks in advance

[pcthug]

Rewriting the URI with mod_rewrite is the most mainstream and efficient method used, It may also be possible to create a literal directory entitled showpage and then for every id variable put a php file in the showpage directory with there relative name (i.e. id_453.php, id_454.php, id_455.php, etc.) and then simply fetch the id number from the URI and include the relative data.

[NogDog]

A quick change I'd do is change the "id" variable name in the URL to something else, as Google ignores pages with "id" as a URL variable. (That's assuming you want Google to index those pages?)

[iambaz]

Search engine listinks aren't really a big concern, accessibility is the main issue. The pages must validate with accessibility standards, but the validators simply dont like variables in the url!

[NogDog]

URL rewriting is probably the way to go, then. There are a lot of guides to this on the web; here's the first decent-looking one I found (http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html) after a quick Google.

[iambaz]

thanks for the advice guys!