In yet another example of a busman’s holiday(weekend?) I spent most of the past couple of days working on this site in an effort to make the site validate per W3C standards. Here’s a quick overview of why web standards are important.
The current index page and the monthly archives for the past couple of months validate, but there are still some lingering issues with older posts. The pages validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional. I considered going for XHTML validation, but to do so would require some pretty major work on the site. (Perhaps Zeldman’s Better Living Through XHTML will help.) Hey, isn’t that the great thing about standards, “there are so many to choose from!”
I think a monster has been unleashed; rather than exporting the db, editing, and then importing into a new database, I’m now editing the db directly, using phpmyadmin. It’s faster and more direct, though no doubt slightly more dangerous. In either case, I’ve dumped a copy of the db as a backup.
Just so I don’t forget: I had to add the “alt” tag to where.pl, the code that provides the Recent Visitor function. I also had to modify lib/MT/Util.pm to eliminate a redundant paragraph terminator from being inserted. I found some previous discussions about this problem, though I don’t think I’m seeing quite the same thing as Steven.
Congratulations. I just went through the exercise of making everything on my website validate a few weeks ago. However, I’ve made some changes since then, including starting a new MT weblog, so I should probably check again. I have a perl script that checks all my static files and just reports if there is a problem.
Love your photos.