Penmachine

I'm a pretty Type B guy in most circumstances—just ask my wife. But when it comes to web pages and certain other technical things, I have some compulsions. One is trying to keep the HTML code valid. That's not always possible for a variety of reasons (hmm, maybe I'm not quite so compulsive after all), but I do try.

Thus, I spent the past two hours wrestling with my new page template here to try to get it to validate to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional specification. Pretty much no one who visited during that time would have noticed any changes, but it turns out that a lot of Blogger's clever automated code for comments, backlinks, and in-place editing of blog posts won't validate, no matter what you do.

So I got rid of most of it, which makes editing this blog slightly more work, but not enough for me to justify keeping the code permanently invalid. I did find one slightly clever way of making sure the comments still work, but backlinks and edit buttons and stuff are gone.I won't miss them.

Even so, on the individual post pages, where comments appear, I can't get the page to validate at all because of Blogger's semi-crappy code, not all of which I want remove. I'll have to go for Type B on that. Now, time to down my chemo pills and head for radiation treatment again. There's a real problem to deal with.

Labels: design, geekery, php, redesign, relaunch, xhtml