blogger & xhtml 1.0 strict validation

I contacted Blogger about some validation issues I’m having with their Blogger-generated code. They acknowledged the problem, but said that working on it was a low-priority task. I’m reproducing the email exchange below: Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 18:08:06 -0700 From: “Blogger Support” To: “Ali Ebrahim (3181470, )” Subject: Re: XHTML 1.0 is broken on … Continue reading “blogger & xhtml 1.0 strict validation”

I contacted Blogger about some validation issues I’m having with their Blogger-generated code. They acknowledged the problem, but said that working on it was a low-priority task. I’m reproducing the email exchange below:

Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 18:08:06 -0700
From: “Blogger Support”
To: “Ali Ebrahim (3181470, )”
Subject: Re: XHTML 1.0 is broken on Individual Post Pages
User-Agent: Neotonic Trakken/2.10.3

Hi there,

Thanks for letting us know about this validation issue. Unless they
actually break functionality somewhere in Blogger or are causing true
accessibility issues, they will likely be treated as low-priority.

-Blogger Support

Original Message Follows:
————————
From: “Ali Ebrahim (3181470, )”
Subject: XHTML 1.0 is broken on Individual Post Pages
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 11:43:28 -0700

Hi,

The individual post pages contain invalid XHTML 1.0 code, stopping them from validating as valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. This is very easy to fix, as the problems are not complicated.

There are 3 (minor) problems that I see:

a) Many of the links have ampersands in them, but they are not properly escapced as XHTML requires. When you have an ampersand anywhere on an XHTML page as part of the page text or as part of an href attribute it should be sent as ‘&’, not as ‘&’.

b) The 1×1 pixel delete post image does not have an alt attribute. This is required by XHTML 1.0 Strict.
c) Users are allowed to enter invalid XHTML tags in their comments. For example, capital letters are not valid in tags in XHTML, but users are allowed to enter <I>foo</I> in their comments. If they do this, the tags should automatically be converted to lowercase to this: <i>foo</i>.

I know that Blogger has made a big push towards being XHTML 1.0 Compliant, and if you fix these small minor errors, then your pages will validate fully everywhere, as long as users don’t break them themselves.

Thanks,
Ali Ebrahim