Real XHTML

  1. Evan Goer: Jacques Distler may well be the only person on the planet who understands the XHTML 1 specification and uses it properly
  2. Jacques Distler: Wearing sunglasses at night is not only useless, it can be downright dangerous.
    1. Phil Ringnalda: I just typed an ampersand in your comment entry textarea, clicked Preview, and said “yep, MT’s still not quite ready for application/xhtml+xml.”
    2. Jaques Distler: So, with the help of a patched version of Alexei Kosut’s MTValidate plugin, we make sure that comments posted to this blog are valid XHTML before they get posted.
    3. Jacques Distler: Anyway, if you’re missing a Perl module, you’ll find a panoply of errors in your server logs when you start using the plugin, and you’ll have to track down and install the missing modules. You may also need a copy of the OpenSP program.
  3. Evan Goer: XHTML is pretty damn hard. If the Alpha Geeks can’t get it right, who can?
    1. Phil Ringnalda: I wonder how long it will be before those of us with comments enabled think twice about linking to a weblog post without comments, knowing that we will become the comment host for that entry, for our readers.
    2. Evan Goer: Anyway, in other news: I’ve decided to open up comments on this journal.
    3. Phil Ringnalda: Comment counts are just a leftover from times when we had no choice

I can’t even manage to thread links to it, but I do love to see serious geekery being done. I just wish I could manage to get MTValidate running on my crappy shared host, less to stop you from posting invalid, not-well-formed comments than to cut out the step in my posting process where I click Save, go to my main page, scroll down to the link to the validator, see how I screwed it up, go back to edit, rinse, repeat. Nesting links and quotes in nested lists and quoting from a page using the accursed SmartyPants makes me suspect that I’ll be back at this editing window again shortly. Three Four Five times, but who’s counting?

8 Comments

Comment by Jacques Distler #
2003-05-05 23:01:18

One mo’ time.

The URL for #2:3 (”Anyway, if you’re missing a Perl module…”) should be http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000155.html , not the permalink for this page.

 
Comment by Jacques Distler #
2003-05-05 23:28:46

quoting from a page using the accursed SmartyPants makes me suspect that I’ll be back at this editing window again shortly

Just a hint (though a rather geeky one):

If you are trying to quote from a page which uses non-ascii characters (like one which has been processed by SmartyPants), you will find it less error-prone to copy/paste from the ”View Source” window, rather than from the browser window. Less ”friendly”, but less error-prone, too.

I just happen to be addicted to nice typography. So shoot me.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2003-05-05 23:42:02

Yeah, I’ve heard rumors that if I switch to a decent operating system that’ll help too. I wouldn’t mind copying from source so much if Phoenix’s ’View selection source’ showed actual source, rather than source-as-rendered.

But my problem is that I never, ever notice that people are using fancy quotes until the validator tells me. That might explain why I don’t use them myself.

 
 
Comment by Mark #
2003-05-06 13:36:41

He he. ”Trackbacks are comments” my ass.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2003-05-06 13:50:35

What’s that?

Comment by Mark #
2003-05-06 14:24:12

Aww, c’mon. That was the first-ever occurrence of the word ”yeast” on your entire site. How could you just go and delete it?

& & & [I got your &, right here – Ed.]

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2003-05-06 16:24:14

And worse yet, I really liked the yeast thread, got halfway through making a first p0st comment about you murdering entire yeast civilizations before they had a chance to shine, but stalled when I couldn’t remember how to spell some word, and looking it up took 90 minutes. Google’s a nice spellchecker, but only when there’s nothing interesting in the first few results.

Still, you’re right, if I’m going to call them comments I need to keep them as comments. I was willing to leave it as the sort of tangent that livens up a comment thread (sure, XHTML, but how about yeast?), but once you pointed it out it had to go, for the betterment of the species.

Funny thing about comments from Mr. A who works at the B company: that ought to be a reminder to me to remove the email field, since I don’t really want to know about it or use it, but in fact getting mail from a@b.com is a really easy way to tell at a glance that you commented, and it makes me less willing to drop the email field.

 
 
 
 
Trackback by Musings #
2003-05-07 09:17:13

I Came, I Saw, I Validated

Evan’s little essay has exploded like a cluster bomb on the geeky end of the blogosphere. It, and the more…

 
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