XHTML 1.0 Transitional

I gave my new Blogger template to someone today. It's always scary giving away source code (even HTML-based), because it is never as pretty as you like.

Afterwards, I thought, "Maybe I should run this through the W3C Validator to see where the problems are." Boy was I surprised at the outcome!

First of all, I think that Blogger has some issues with ampersands in URLs. Like, if I supply a Link in the blog's title, the ampersand is not automatically escaped for me. This was one thing that caused validation to fail.

Similarly, when I use Blogger's "Compose" mode (WYSIWYG HTML editing for you non-Bloggers) and enter a URL, Blogger will detect it and wrap the URL with an <a> tag. The problem is, that ampersands within the href property are not automatically escaped, leading to my blog failing validation.

I was expecting to find a lot of simple errors, like single tags (<hr> and <br>) that were not closed. But one thing that bugged the crap out of me was that the validator did not like a <noscript> tag that was part of my Statcounter code. I eventually gave up, and removed the <noscript> part.


But, now, the template (and newer content, at least) has passed validation using XHTML-Transitional! XHTML-Strict looks like a nastier beast, so I don't think I'll spend time fighting with that just yet.