In what turned out to be a relatively painless exercise, I made this site validate against the XHTML 1.0 strict specification. Though I started out with over 500 errors, many of them were unclosed img and br statements. There were a few missing paragraph statements, and that was about it. I hadn’t realized I was so close to having a valid site; I just thought I’d fix a few obvious flaws and get a sense of the extent of the problem when I started out yesterday afternoon. By evening, the site was validating!
But, there’s one very frustrating thing left. I can’t claim XHTML 1.1 compliance. That’s due to how MovableType refers to articles within a page. The system uses anchors, implemented using “name”, which has been replaced by “id”. I could cope with that, but “ids” cannot begin with a numeral, as MT article ids do, so there is no obvious, quick, transparent fix.
The archives and permalinks still don’t validate, but their time is coming. I’m next going to work on making the permalink template validate and after that turn my attention to the date and category archives, in that order. I don’t know that I’ll ever get a chance to go through my oldest content and make it validate, but having all content from now on validate is a good thing.