A friend pointed out that my blog doesn’t pass the W3C validation test, so I popped down to take a look and sure enough I had 222 failures. I’ve sorted out a lot of them, but now I’ve hit a bunch of errors caused by 3rd party widgets I’m running on the site.
So, the question is, do I accept that my blog doesn’t validate? Or do I remove my Google Talkback widget, my Twitter widget and my MyBlogLog widget so that my blog validates perfectly.
Well, the answer is no, I’m perfectly happy with them, and some validation failures aren’t a cause for me to lose sleep at night (and thanks to my memory foam mattress, I don’t have any problem with sleeping)
What about you? Does your blog validate?
My blog doesn’t validate because I use Community Server. Very very few components sourced through open source of commercially produce compliant output and it really winds me up. Even if your site is AAA, soliciting user input results in non-compliance:
http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/program.x/archive/2008/03/23/semantic-web-2-0-user-generated-content-is-difficult-to-achieve.aspx
And Google is amongst the worst offenders. Relying on Javascript and IFrames (which themselves are security holes) to insert Adwords, Blog excerpts, Picasa feeds, and the rest. Mash-ups are truly Mashed XHTML thanks to lack of respect for basic standards.
I try to make mine W3 XHTML compliant where I can – this involves tweaking the theme and the occasional plug-in modification complete with an email back to the author so hopefully it will be fixed in the next version.
At the moment I have one plug-in that is misbehaving when rewriting parts of the HTML stream for Google Analytics tracking – trying to get that resolved with the author…
[)amien
Nope, as hard as I’ve tried over the past two years I can’t make it validate so I gave up and let it stop bothering me.