I try to make standards-compliant web pages here at movingtofreedom.org. It appeals to my petty, detail-oriented side. The compiler in me loves it when W3C or xmllint or tidy reports a valid web page. A pass from xmllint or tidy, or the green “valid” result from W3C is like a pat on the head. Good boy!
Why do I use XHTML for this place? Because that’s what WordPress templates were using when I started this site in 2006. I’m sure that’s still the case today, although some searching tells me it doesn’t have to be that way. XHTML seemed like the thing to do three years ago and I was happy to learn about it and conform to the transitional XHTML doctype. I wasn’t so excited about the strict doctype, but figured that was a concern for another day.
(Tangentially, an obscure poem recently made me aware of standards upheaval on the horizon involving the death of XHTML 2 and the emergence of HTML 5. I was surprised — although I shouldn’t have been! — about all of the passion and anger around this topic.)
Anyway, this post isn’t to talk about competing web standards. I only vaguely understand what’s at stake anyway. I just wanted to point out that while I proudly display the W3C validation link on each page here, I have to acknowledge that I fall short of compliance. In order to embed YouTube videos in my pages so that they will show up on the page in my Firefox installation on Ubuntu, and show up in my feed on Google Reader, I’ve made an exception to include (*gasp*) invalid XHTML transitional markup.
No big whoop, really, although it bothers me to claim valid XHTML on every page when I know that isn’t always the case. I’m just posting this so I can link to it from the sidebar as a kind of validation disclaimer.
