Sharepoint woes

Lately I've been learning about SharePoint 2007, and so far, I would have to say it is a very impressive product.

One thing I want to do, however, requires some changes to the master pages.

Out of the box, the SharePoint master page contains so many pieces that break the current xhtml standard that I can barely stand it.

To be fair, there is no indication that Sharepoint is in any way attempting to comply with this standard (recommendation,... whatever), and that's fine I guess since there are certainly still some problems with the recommendation (Although, most of those problems revolve around poor support of the other recommendations that have supposedly replaced functionality from the HTML standard, but which really don't, namely, CSS). However, a vast majority of this standard is really good, particularly in its consistency and form.

To continue to be fair, there are tools in the Sharepoint designer to auto format the template as xhtml, but when I applied them, the master page broke immediately, and since I am not clear on which specific change caused the break, I find myself needing to fix things incrementally in order to be sure.

It is my honest belief that tools such as SharePoint, .Net framework and any IDEs, frameworks, etc (Microsoft or not) that form the backbone of nearly all development, web or otherwise, have a responsibility to have at least their most common templates fit a high quality standard. If they don't, then they affect the quality of all development projects.

Anyway, I guess that's enough of my ranting for now.