Download XTH (v2.01) here

By popular demand here it is – version 2.01 of the original XHTML-to-HTML wordpress plugin. Now called XTH (bit catchier, no?), it is a complete rewrite of the original version and aims to fix the Javascript CDATA and RSS feed issues that the original suffered.

Caveats

OK, this version seems to successfully avoid parsing inline Javascripts and external Javascript libraries. This is necessary because the XHTML closing sequence is a valid pattern in javascript regex, and removing it from those places would mess up those libraries.
The downside to that is that it’s then up to you to make sure that any JS you use doesn’t output any XHTML, as XTH no longer ‘fixes’ it for you.
Same goes for any other external libs that you or your plugins load.

Note that XTH doesn’t address javascript URLs of the form <a href=”javascript:foo()”>. This is for efficiency – and also because I haven’t ever seen a regex used in that context, but who knows, someone might try it. I might add this as an option in a future

Don’t forget!

A single XHTML closer anywhere in the output will fail HTML 4.01 validation Resulting in tag soup and defeating the object of the whole exercise.

XTH also avoids RSS feeds.

Problems, bugs and comments below please. This is a complete rewrite of the plugin so we’re back to square one with the list of problems and required tweaks.

Thanks to all those people who gave feedback and whose time and knowledge helped to make this new version possible.

Some of these points are covered in other articles, but I thought it would be good to collect them here for your convenience, and so I have a single article to point to when people ask me about Actinic (which is often enough now for me to take the time to write this article).

First off, this article isn’t a how-to or a manual, it is an overview of the main features offered by the Actinic ecommerce system, and some comparisons between it and other systems of the “home-made” variety.

Secondly, some nomenclature: I’ll refer to Actinic as, well, Actinic. However, when doing so I actually mean Actinic Business Client (there are a couple of other lesser versions you can consider if your needs are very simple). And I’ll refer, for historical reasons, to other systems built to order by companies around the country as “Bespoke”. Bespoke is actually something of a misnomer (referring as it does to high-end tailored clothes), your local ecommerce provider might refer to their particular offering as custom, bespoke, in-house, built-to-order, purpose built, or any other form of words that means basically – “we made it specially for you”. For my purposes they are all Bespoke.

Overview of Actinic’s main features

• flexibility:
  Actinic steals the socks off the competition when it comes to general purpose retailing features. It can deal with (almost) any retailing model except those with very specific requirements (see below), you can bundle products or split them into smaller products (components), product management is graphical and comprehensive, there are advanced features for setting up complicated types of products.

  This makes it perfect for selling groceries, musical instruments, records, wine, books, hardware and electrical items. It is not as suitable for selling, for example, curtains which often require complicated relationships between a product’s components: ie. a length of curtain might be sold by the metre, to a particular template, and with optional gathering, types of heading and pelmets (which also have their own styles and options). That sort of retail model might be better suited to a bespoke system.

• marketing and sales features:
  Actinic comes with a lengthy list of marketing and promotion features that includes sophisticated discounting, related products, also bought, top products and new products. Products can be priced according to volume, quantity or any other metric you need to use. Discounts can be applied to customers with a particular sort of account, for instance, you can give your trade customers a VAT-free experience, your regular customers a 10% discount, or any customer a discount based on their order total. The flexibility is really impressive and is able to cope with pretty much all the most common forms of price marketing.
• secure order system:
  Actinic downloads orders straight to your desktop and it interfaces with numerous payment providers (for instance Paypal or Worldpay). In fact Actinic is a desktop application, which has many benefits for you as a shopkeeper. The secure order processing though is a vital facility which again comes with a variety of options according to the type of order processing you want to do. Want to download your orders and swipe the card details yourself? No problem. Want your customers’ details to be processed in real-time by your bank? No problem. The options don’t end there either, however the subject starts to get a bit technical so I’ll move on to…
• reliability and pedigree:
  This is an overlooked but fundamental “feature” that ecommerce system vendors ought to take more seriously than they sometimes do. Your ecommerce shop is, in many cases, your livelihood. You can’t afford for it to be crashing or getting mixed up between whose order is for which customer, or sending orders off to the wrong address. Do not underestimate the number and gravity of the sorts of problems that you can find with an ecommerce application.

  Your system needs to be rock solid, thoroughly tested, and all the main facilities need to work properly 100% of the time. Aside from the potential inconvenience and headaches system bugs can cause, they can thoroughly damage your business’s reputation too. Unlike your friendly neighbourhood bespoke systems, Actinic has eight years of solid, continuous development to call on. It is robust, secure and as near as damn it bug-free (it’s certainly free of category 1 bugs). It is also designed, built and supported by a large company with experience in EPOS and traditional secure retailing. And there are regular updates and patches to keep your site secure from hackers.

• time to market:
  Most people, once they’ve taken the decision to start doing business online, want to just get on with it. They do not want to wait for several months for a bespoke system to go through the design, implementation and testing phases (which they absolutely require). And why should you have to wait around for someone to re-invent the wheel, particularly when they have little chance of improving on it? In the 3-4 months you wait for your bespoke system to roll out, your competitors could have stolen a march on you. Using Actinic, you can get a basic ecommerce business up and running in days. For more complicated sites it might take a few weeks from start to finish.
• maintenance and development
  No system lasts forever. Needs, priorities and tastes change over time and your shop needs to change accordingly. If your competitors start offering new features you need to keep up. You will, anyway, want to change things about your shop as time goes by: as you gain experience as an online retailer, as you think up new ways to do things, or as you notice ways your current site could be improved. The engine that runs your ecommerce business needs to be able to cope with this natural evolution as much as possible. Actinic is updated regularly with relevant new features and the features in the current versions are more than enough for most businesses. Even if you want to upgrade your whole application this is not going to break the bank. On the contrary, bespoke engines are very expensive to develop and upgrade. This is mainly because it’s time consuming to do that (as the system needs to be redesigned, rebuilt and retested), and unfortunately, as the sole customer, you usually have to bear the brunt of those development costs.
• other Actinic features:
  • Stock monitoring.
    Actinic can monitor your stock levels and withdraw products from sale if they’ve run out. It can also continue to display them but with an out-of-stock message.
  • Office integration.
    Actinic can import and export data to Sage Line 50 and Quickbooks.
  • Growth potential.
    It is capable of dealing with high volume sites and product catalogues containing up to 20,000 products. You can be sure, if your hosting is up to the task, that Actinic won’t crumple under the weight of your success.
  • Go worldwide.
    Actinic also has excellent delivery and tax options, which can be configured independently for different regions and zones (UK, Europe, US, Rest of the World, for example). You can choose how delivery is calculated using a variety of measures that obviously includes weight or quantity, but which can also determine how much to charge for larger orders or where the customer opts for a slower or faster delivery service.

The million dollar question

In most cases cost is a deciding factor. Actinic is in my (humbly expert) opinion, the best value ecommerce system on the market – by a mile. Even a shop built using the top of the range Actinic Business client can start from as little as a thousand pounds, with prices increasing according to how much design customisation you want. This is a fraction (literally) of what a bespoke system would cost you for comparable features and power, and it would arrive soon after order bug-free and ready to rock – quite unlike your bespoke option which teeters out to first testing after a long gestation like a new born deer with wobbly legs.

Free and easy

There is a class of ecommerce system that I haven’t mentioned. Because I don’t think you should consider them. I’m talking about the ‘free’ systems that most hosting companies bundle next to ‘Javascript Hit Counter’ and the other free software that comes with your hosting control panel. Now these systems take longer to customise than Actinic, offer a pittance of features, and generally can’t be customised beyond the product catalogue (so your customers check out in something rather less than style). On top of all this, by the time you’ve paid a developer to customise it for you, I guarantee it will have cost you more or as much as an equivalently styled Actinic Catalogue site. These free systems aren’t free, and are the equivalent of shabby market retailing. If you really can’t afford to set up shop properly I advise you to forget it and trade on Ebay or Amazon instead.

Truly Bespoke

Ok, Actinic is not the last word in ecommerce. I started this article saying that it has limitations, and it does. I don’t recommend it, or any pre-built system, for big ecommerce enterprises. Big retailers who have a lot to gain and lose need a relationship with their ecommerce provider that must by need go beyond that which Actinic is capable of providing. Sometimes they need to be able to request innovative and forward-looking features that pave the way for off-the-shelf packages to follow. They might need several development scenarios to choose from, comprehensive documentation or security systems in place, any of which will require a bespoke solution.

However, here I’m talking about Bespoke with a capital ‘B’, where the word fits it’s original meaning of a high-quality product designed specifically for a wealthy client. This option is, without argument, the ultimate ecommerce option, but it’s available only to a very few – because it costs a fortune to create and develop. There are many reasons to go bespoke – but these days they apply to a small percentage of ecommerce retailers – those who can afford the time and who have the resources, and (usually to their chagrin) those whose business models don’t allow them to use off-the-shelf solutions. Going for a bespoke solution without a real need or more importantly the time and money to do it properly is a brave decision.

Conclusion

You know what I’m going to say. It’s a no brainer! at least for almost all small or medium-sized businesses. You will pay ten or fifteen times the price for a bespoke system that is as powerful, making them easily the best ecommerce websites available. Which, obviously, they would have to be for Kilroy James to recommend them.

Waiver:

Neither John Kilroy or anyone at Kilroy James has been bribed by Actinic in the making of this article

Unless you are going to serve your pages with a mime-type of application/xml (which virtually nobody does), and therefore make your pages innaccessible to the 65% of your viewers who use Microsoft browsers – you should NOT use the XHTML doctype.

I do sympathise with the Wordpress developers, who’ve clearly gone to a lot of effort to provide output that validates using the W3C HTML validator. However, whilst admirable it is, nevertheless, a mistake, and if Wordpress is really interested in standards and valid markup they should head back to HTML – awaiting the release of HTML 5 (the likely successor to HTML 4.01).

This is a rather technical issue and to explain it fully needs more detail than I can afford here. However, there are some clear explanations of the major issues here:
http://webkit.org/blog/68/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml

and a more technical discussion here:
http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

Please either revert back to HTML as the default, provide the option to select it in the Dashboard, or write a plugin that will translate back to HTML (thereby allowing Wordpress to serve valid markup).

Kilroy James first surveyed this group, and a much larger group of smaller companies, in 2004 in order to get a picture of the general web design standards promoted and achieved by British companies. Now in its third year the survey has developed greatly, applying up to twenty tests during each homepage examination.

The FTSE 100 survey looks at WCAG Accessibility ratings, W3C technical testing, and the use (and omittance) of numerous usability features. It measures basic good design and technical practice. We view it and encourage others to view it as a benchmark of basic quality, indicating entry-level standards we think all web sites should meet.

Main findings

• 75% of homepages fail basic technical testing and 86% contain programming faults.
• 93% do not meet recommended accessibility standards (WCAG priority II). 56% do not meet the industry minimum standard.
• Less than a third (30%) provide properly resizeable text.
• 87% have a search facility on their web site, but only 71% present it on the homepage.
• The average score is 38%.

Interpretation of results

The best homepages meet basic standards and get the important things right. However, 86% do not meet basic standards, which is a poor figure lending a certain distinction to the 14% who do. Beyond standards conformance, the best sites achieve good accessibility ratings and show that the designer has considered Information Architecture and Usability issues.

The survey’s overall finding though is that the majority of tested homepages are poor (some are very poor indeed) and only a few would meet the standards required of a public sector web site, which isn’t very encouraging considering these are the UK’s largest companies.

Methodology

The survey tests the homepage of the main corporate web site for each member of the FTSE 100 and is in two parts: Basic and Extended. The Basic test looks at eleven aspects of a page’s design and implementation including: whether text resizing is properly implemented; W3C markup and CSS validation; and the presence, form and positioning of any search function. The Extended test looks at nine other elements including WCAG ratings.

We do not publish the exact survey methodology but it does account for qualities such as scrolling, title length and text resizeability, and the use of popup windows, splash pages and search functions.

The scoring method reflects the fact that the tests cover a range of faults with varying degrees of scope and seriousness. For example text resizeability is considered to be more important than whether a homepage scrolls or not: because scrolling is only bad if it makes the scrollbar difficult to use (and homepages are rarely that long, plus there are other ways to scroll a page) whereas a web page with unredeemably small text can, to people with less than perfect eyesight, be rendered unusable.

The 2006 survey was conducted during July and August; web pages may have changed since they were surveyed.