Anything goes

I was writing the other day about the trouble I was having with the XHTML validation of the blog. And I must say: at one point I was getting pretty mad, going through the output of the validation and trying to solve issues one by one.

I mean, I understood that the code provided by youtube was not standard compliant, but then I tried to validate a post without clips and it failed too. I kept getting these errors about target=”_blank” in hyperlinks and that kind of cut my enthusiasm, because it all seemed just too complicated. I mean, I *am* an engineer, but I work with embedded stuff and that just seems more simple than all this XHTML stuff! This is not true, of course, but I was mad then and was feeling this way.

In fact, I had removed the link to the validation altogether at one point. I had understood the solution was not in removing all the reported errors, but the fact that the page was declared as Strict XHTML 1.0, but I really didn’t feel like modifying the template to Transitional. I had just tried too many things and was getting too tired to try this last one, too, which I wasn’t 100% sure about anyway.

But all that has changed, thanks to some very useful help from fellow Romanian blogger SaltwaterC. It was his comment for that post that convinced me to modify the template to Transitional. In the end, the change wasn’t very difficult and involved 2 fairly simple steps, both on a single line in the file header.php from the theme. Basically, it is just replacing Strict/strict with Transitional/transitional respectively in 2 places in the file. This simple thing made all the target=”_blank” errors go away.

Next, youtube embedding.

Again, SaltwaterC saved the day, with his cool plugin XHTML Video Embed. So I just installed the plugin, made small changes to the posts and voila: perfect validation for the whole site. So now I am able to place the XHTML validation link back on the page.

Let’s move on, then. There’s work to do, still.