Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

Migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

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SharePoint master page and page layout. As a fi nal step, they’d test the design in all of the organization’s

supported browsers — typically, both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Then they would identify

some subtle design elements that didn’t match exactly, requiring a frustrating process of massaging the

HTML and CSS to ensure that the design was rendered uniformly across different browsers.

Creating custom designs in SharePoint 2010 should be a simpler process for designers. Because the

HTML is cleaner, it should be easier for designers to create the look and feel they want — without

having to wrestle with the code as much as they did in the previous version. And once the design is

implemented, it is more likely to look the same across multiple browsers.

Some designers might still be unhappy that despite all the improvements to SharePoint 2010, it still

is not 100 percent XHTML-compliant. Although that’s true, many improvements have been made,

such as cleaner HTML rendered by most of the controls and fewer tables in the design. As a general

rule, the new controls being written for SharePoint will produce XHTML-compliant code; it is the

older controls that are generating noncompliant code. Over time, those will be replaced, but for now

the changes to standards compliance in SharePoint 2010 are a big step in the rig ...