MovableBlog: Validation, Plugins
January 13, 2003
Mark Pilgrim bemoans the diminishing returns of validating websites as well as the creeping obsolescence of tags and attributes he uses regularly. I've fought battles with the W3C validator, and quite a few times threw my hands in the air. I've come to rely on the MTRegex plugin to replace <u> tags with <span style="text-decoration: underline;"> (actually I use a CSS class, but you get the idea) to validate a site of mine into XHTML 1.1, and place <p> tags within <blockquote> tags when writing a post in MT and then I use the FormatBreaks plugin to make sure the proper breaks are inserted around <div> and <blockquote< tags. It's a little frustrating that I have to use so much glue to fix something of MT's just to get validation, when it looks fine, really, in any browser. In July, I joked that "we all know that trying to make your weblog validate to XHTML Transitional is a waste of time", but that seems to be what Mark is saying: there's too much glue that goes into validating a weblog, and that sometimes validation fixes one problem while creating others.
Just wanted to point out something else: I'm a recent convert to using plugins over using PHP code to achieve something on a weblog. In a way, Ben and Mena opened up MT so that users could be responsible for creating new MT tags while they concentrate on the database/interface aspect of things.
The sidebar has some links to some interesting plugins that I'd like to check out. I'm going to use—which is to say I have been using—this site as sort of a playground for MT, PHP and now plugins.