• I’ve yet to see any. Sure, when you have a fresh WordPress install with nothing but the design or with only one or two posts it is compliant, but what about 3 months later? Something in one of your posts will always end up “breaking” the XHTML.
    What difference does xhtml compliance make anyway? Is there a benefit to xhtml compliance, or a downside to non-compliance?
    Anyone ever actually seen an XHTML compliant blog with more than …say 30 posts?

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)
  • Over 50 posts, and afik, all are valid xhtml1.1 strict. I’ve tested (randomly) about 6 posts with comments, and all validate.
    I want valid markup so that if/when new browsing devices come out (better cell phone browsers, PDA’s, set top boxes, connected DVR’s, whatever), I can be pretty certain my site will work. It already works as is on my cell phone and my Palm, with no “alternate” or WAP versions needed. A non compliant (particularly table based) site probably won’t have such luck. I run across sites all the time that I can’t view on my PDA…which sucks when I’m just trying to look something up while sitting at the pub.
    I also want my site to be accessible. I have 2 co-workers who use assistive devices – one is blind, the other has very poor eyesight and must use a screen reader. Who knows who else might find a post of mine via Google or a link on some other blog? Do I know what browsing devide they’re using? No. So, I make sure my code is valid and accessible, and can feel pretty safe that I’m not locking anyone out unnessesarily.
    The thing that gets me about compliance issues is: with a blog, it’s pretty damn easy to produce valid markup. So the big question is: why wouldn’t you?

    Dave Hyatt works for Apple on the renderer WebCore that Apple uses for Safari (and shares with Konquerer). He has a blog in which he discusses various interesting aspects of his work:
    https://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/
    In particular, as I recall, he has expressed the idea that the hard part isn’t handling standard compliant markup, but gracefully handling uncompliant markup. Here’s a relevant post from him (in the context of discussing how XML error failure is different from HTML error failure):

    Fully half of the bugs I receive in WebCore are not bugs at all, but are essentially differences in error handling and error recovery between Safari and the dominant Web browser, WinIE. None of these issues occur with XML.
    If we lived in a world where browsers could refuse to display malformed content (with useful error notification of course so that authors could easily repair their content), then all of these “bugs” would simply disappear. I could focus my efforts on real DOM and CSS bugs, and not have to waste my time emulating the behavior of WinIE.

    So, as previous posters have said, if you have clean markup, you know what to expect and can reasonably be unhappy at browsers that don’t comply. If you have erronious markup, then you have to just hope that every browser deals with the error in the same way the Author’s browser dealt with it.

    Oh yes, and in case my indirect sentiment wasn’t clear enough: if the vast majority of web sites were valid, then web renderers would be much faster and smaller and the developers would have time to implement the emerging standards that much more quickly.

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)
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