Seeking validation
Thu Apr 15, 2010 22:32 (UTC -5)I have a web site. (No, wait, I know that’s really obvious. There’s more.) I also run several other web sites as a job. At work, I spend a lot of time making sure that the sites adhere to web standards by using HTML tags properly and the like. On my personal site, not so much. I don’t check it quite as compulsively, and for a long time I was content for this site to be invalid XHTML due to the Creative Commons licensing bit at the bottom.
Well, no more. I actually changed each page’s doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML + RDFa 1.0 so that each page would validate. But there was more to it than that. By historical accident, the doctype and head tag for each page was on the page itself rather than in the header file common to all pages, so I had to create a new header file and update almost every page on the site to use it. At the same time, I decided to switch each page’s character encoding to UTF-8 wherever feasible (most were ISO-8859-1). The blog posts in WordPress (all posts since 2005) remain ISO-8859-1; that’s a task for another day.
Among the dozens of pages I had to update were the blog archives for 2003 and 2004. Digging back through my old (X)HTML, I found some interesting things. For example, a November 2004 post titled “Is Blogging Old Hat?” had a paragraph tag that wasn’t closed. The interesting part is that the sentence contained in the paragraph wasn’t even finished:
TWoS can be found on the first page of the search results, which just goes to show you
Show you what? Such a cliffhanger! I thought that this error might have been introduced by a later edit to the page, but the Wayback Machine’s archived version from a week after the post was written also contains the error. (If for nothing else, check it out to see what the site looked like back then.) Anyway, I just closed the tag. I wasn’t making editorial changes, after all. As much as I would like not to have bandied about phrases like “old hat,” it just wouldn’t be right.
An infographic about the Internet: The State of the Internet. (Via J-Walk Blog)
30 Bizarre Examples of Defacing Money. There are a lot of nerdy references there; cool points for not understanding them. Also, I have to point out that it must be more fun to deface British money because the Queen is, like, alive and stuff. (Via The Presurfer)
And finally, find out what it was like to be Helen Keller with the online Helen Keller Simulator.
7 comments
#1 by Andy: Thu Apr 15, 2010 22:45 (UTC -5)
A cliffhanger indeed! Definitely got a good lol out of that one.
#2 by Antonio: Sat Apr 17, 2010 07:51 (UTC -5)
You have a site? No! I so never knew that!
Also, if you view the source of the Helen Keller sim, the meta names and the HTML comment are worth looking at.
#3 by Antonio: Sat Apr 17, 2010 07:55 (UTC -5)
…the latter of which reads “this is not the source code you are looking for.” Fantastic.
#4 by Jordon Kalilich: Sat Apr 17, 2010 08:23 (UTC -5)
I did check that out, but I didn’t bother to decipher it. Good work.
#5 by Keith: Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:40 (UTC -5)
It seems more common to hack together a site that works in the big browsers when working on commercial sites and then geek out with standards on personal sites.
#6 by Jordon Kalilich: Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:44 (UTC -5)
Yeah, it seems that a lot of the most popular web sites fail validation. It’s a shame, really, because they’d stand to gain the most if web standards were better supported.
#7 by Diane Neill Jensen: Mon Apr 19, 2010 13:58 (UTC -5)
Well, I’m more of a marketer in the pre-web sense, so my eyes glazed over at your technical info starting with paragraph two, but it reminds me that I need to apply what I now know about blogging to my old posts. Thanks for the info.