more XHTML nerdery

[mmcirvin]

It's very hard to keep a LiveJournal or other blog-like substance anywhere near validation. This page's template is actually pretty close, but little things that are out of my control keep popping up. For instance, in this string of nonsense, regardless of my code tweaks, something deep within LiveJournal keeps insisting on inserting a mysterious wbr tag. As far as I can tell, this is not a real HTML 4 tag, let alone a real XHTML tag. So it wrecks validation. Fortunately it doesn't seem to do any actual harm.


And: Hey, cool, the "current music" metadata has a cedilla where it's not supposed to be, and another one missing where it's supposed to be.

Comments

[jwgh]

Does this shed any light on anything?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ah, it's just some Microsoft hoo-hah.

[jwgh]

Maybe it puts one of those in if you have a single unbroken string that's more than 40 characters long? Let's see.

00000000011111111112222222222333333333344444444445
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890

If so, then putting in some other do-nothing tag in the middle might prevent it from being inserted.

00000000011111111112222222222333333333344444444445
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Looks like you guessed right.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Your nerding and LJ's horrid code make the Baby Jesus cry.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Various little things lead me to believe that LiveJournal is trying to move toward a standard XHTML/CSS-based environment. They just don't seem to be trying very hard (fair enough; the staff is small and they have many things to work on). A good first step would be conversion of the default user styles to something more like valid XHTML; they could use a transitional doctype if they don't want to give up the table layouts that more than half of them are built around.