I got an email comment on my site today about the fact I have the little W3C valid XHTML symbol on my site but the site doesn’t validate. One problem was my own fault. I’d put some non-compliant code in my sidebar recently and didn’t revalidate. So it was wrong, and I have now fixed it. However, many of my validation error came from my individual blog posts. I hand code most of my posts because Wordpress doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor and I haven’t been happy with the code the possible WYSIWYG plugin options
As a result, it would be extremely time consuming to revalidate after every new post I make. So I don’t. More than 90% of my posts are fine. However the ones where I’m posting code examples seem to cause create validation issues. I’m not sure when I upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 if all my problems in this area will be solved or not. Only time will tell and I’ll try to revalidate the rest of my pages after the upgrade. Do other bloggers out there validate their code after every posts? For those of you posting code how to you get it formatted nice and still validate?
Instead of putting the W3C “valid” buttons on my site, I put “Powered by XHTML, CSS, and Movable Type 3.2,” with “XHTML” and “CSS” linked to the “validate referrer” URL for the W3C site. I figured that signaled my intention without promising that every page was valid all the time.
I don’t re-validate enough. I usually do it when I have a suspicion that I dropped a tag somewhere in a post.
Your post made me think that it would be cool to have an RSS feed of the validation status of my home page. A Google search led me to this: http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/xhtml_validator_to_rss.html
That seems like it should do the trick; the author, Ben Hammersley, writes “The validation is redone everytime the feed is requested. If there are no errors, the feed will be empty.”
I am having trouble testing it right now, however, as I can’t seem to get through to the W3C validator at all right now. But it looks like a nice (partial) solution.