Posted on: Mar 23 2008
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After walking our lovely blog through a few validation sequences it came to my attention that most widget scripters don’t know their arse from their elbows when it comes to valid XHTML. I came up with 182 errors.
Below you will find a load of nerd-speak pertaining to what I’ve been doing to our little blog:
- Edited the custom smiley plugin to make it include the alt tags. In a few weeks the new smileys will have slowly edged out the old ones and they will be valid XHTML.
- Removed the MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup which showed you all our Zombie Vidar warning. It was so full of errors and bad coding it made me bust a nut.
- Edited the video plugin to get liveleak param tags to close (bad bad liveleak coders to blame). Unfortunately I haven’t managed to re-code the embedding of The Onion’s code.. apparently they’ve never heard of flash validation.
- Changed a load of stuff in the VoteItUp Karma widget. There might be a new version out there, but imo the validation wasn’t good this time around, so why trust the wankstains to do it right the 2nd time.
- Edited the template I built the interface on and made it my own. The designer didn’t know his HTML arse from his HTML elbow either.
So that’s it. I present you with a cleaner, more valid page now (at least, code wise; all you non-nerds won’t know what the problem is or that there ever was one). I know I could’ve gotten around to it earlier, but seeing as it was such a mountain of work I kept postponing it.
The only drawback: No more Zombie Vidar to warn you about the content. Sorry Vidar. People will have to find out who you are the hard way now.
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When everybody and their dog is a webapp coder, this will happen. The quality average will drop to an all-time low; bugs can be hard enough to weed out, but there is no quick fix for a bad design. This is why I never take bits and pieces from different authors and mash it together — it might work but you’ll have no idea of what to do when weird results start showing up.
Write it yourself or leave it be. >:)
Well with embedding video you don’t really have a choice. That said, you are right. I should’ve written all the plugins myself, but as you know my time is limited.
I used to not care much about w3c compliancy either until I realized it was causing most of my webapps to go tits up when subjected to testing by idiots (or microsoft users).
Now I’m just lazy.. which is why it took me so long to validate and rewrite all the plugins.
“idiots (or microsoft users)”… must… refrain… from… obvious… comment… NGGGGGG!
Anyh00, good job on improving the site! (and have you tested against IE8 yet? =])
[...] Read the full work-log of what I did to the page here. [...]
Hehe good job Coen improving the site
This is why I do it myself, from scratch.