a grand summary of markup wankery

[mmcirvin]

Mark Pilgrim tells the truth about various Web buzzwords. Among other things, he explains the reason why I haven't bothered converting most of my classic Web site to XHTML, though I did convert the front page as a lark. For nearly all of today's purposes, XHTML and HTML 4 are six of one, half a dozen of the other. The only reason I use XHTML here is that LiveJournal seems to want us to-- at least, they put the self-closing thingies in BR elements and such, so you don't have a prayer of validating if you don't use XHTML, whereas if you do it's merely highly unlikely.

His statement that validation and CSS are independent isn't quite true: sites that use a lot of CSS tend to blow up in various browsers more often if they don't have some approximation of valid markup. That's true even for crappy old Netscape 4, believe it or not.

Comments

[jecook]

I'm weird.

What little markup I do use runs through the validation process nicely. In fact, I had to add stuff to make it pass. The few pages that do use CSS run fine. The one page that I have not tested is offline due to a back-end problem.

I think that if one goes to the trouble of writing a web page, on should go through the trouble of making sure if passes validation. But that's me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Me too. That's good practice.

What's hard is tweaking your LiveJournal's style so that that validates.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And, incidentally, I had to give up a tiny bit of semantics in order to get validation. From a semantic standpoint, it's better to have LiveJournal entries wrapped in paragraphs than in DIVs (though not perfect, because of all those stupid BRs that are used conventionally to format them). But this will actually break validation under many, many circumstances, because in both HTML and XHTML a P element can only contain inline content. People are forever shoving things that are decidedly not inline content into LiveJournal entries (lists, quizzes, other goofy shit), and there's no reason this shouldn't be valid. Furthermore, I wanted the freedom to play tricks in which I use preformatting to shove multiple fancily-styled Ps into a journal entry, and that is invalid if the entry is itself a P because Ps are not supposed to nest.

So my way of getting around that, and bringing the Friends page in particular much closer to validation, was to define a LiveJournal entry as being a special class of DIV. Unfortunately, that makes it look slightly less nice in Lynx, and might also slightly degrade the page in things like aural browsers unless I use that fancy P trick all the time, which is a bother because it's essentially a manual hack. You can't win...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I turn off auto-format and use old-school HTML in practically all my entries. Don't bother in comments, though.