It seems that more and more open source projects are taking interest in Web Standards and clean validated code. Very few CMS projects out there are 100% XHTML and CSS valid, therefore the need to come up with quality code has been emerging even more. We are talking about future compatibility and accessibility, something that is of everyone’s best interest. One of the main problems regarding these projects is laying on the output of editors.

If we are to develop a website for a client that needs to update a website on his own, an editor that outputs valid XHTML code is a must. Such editors are certainly not for free. One of the best I’ve come across is xstandard that recently has developed a free light version for commercial use. Mind you, I haven’t seen it integrated in any open source project just yet.
Open source is a big hit on ecommerce projects, too. There are a few noteworthy effords on this, such as the so-talked-about freecsscart, that, unfortunately, is still under development and no-one really knows if they’ll ever release it. A similar idea comes from tradingeye, although is not free, something that is totally understandable, as valid code in such projects is definitely not an easy task.

People that contribute on open source projects, cannot afford to invest much time on it as noone is really paying them to do it. It seems that we get what we paid for and that’s only fair.

UPDATE: Movable Type’s publishing platform in now an Open Source project and is available for download. This is definitely something worth looking at, since Movable Type has been a paid project for quite a while.

Tags: open source, web standards