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Validation problem with Feedburner email subscription

June 17, 2008 in Tools

In an earlier post I described a problem with HTML validation of a WordPress site when inserting links using the WYSIWYG editor.

I recently enabled email subscription on my site and inserted Feedburner’s code on my front page. Now I find this too causes a validation error – validator.w3.org doesn’t like the ampersand character (&) in the subscription link code:

http://www.feedburner.com/.../emailverifySubmit?feedId=123&loc=XYZ

The suggested fix is to replace the ampersand with & but unfortunately WordPress promptly turns this back into an ampersand, so it still won’t validate.

The work-around is to remove the &loc=XYZ entirely from the end of the URL – Feedburner doesn’t seem to mind. I guess the problem is that this will default to an English language subscription form at Feedburner… perhaps another example of how English language is dominant in the online world!

Maybe I need to stop worrying so much about validation and just pretend it doesn’t matter…

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WordPress linking causes validation problem

May 23, 2008 in Tools

Inserting a link in WordPress 2.5.1 can cause a validation problem. The problem arises when you insert a link using the Visual editor mode and include a title attribute, generally regarded as highly desirable for reasons of accessibility and promoting your content. The HTML for such a link looks like this:

<a title="Paul Left's blog" href="http://www.verso.co.nz">

W3′s HTML validator doesn’t like this tag: it seem that having the title attribute before the href attribute is invalid code according to the WordPress document type. So the link code should be:

<a href="http://www.verso.co.nz" title="Paul Left's blog">

I click on the HTML tab and go through the code prior to publishing and edit any link tag to ensure the title attribute follows the href attribute. It’s a minor nuisance but there doesn’t appear to be any way to configure WordPress to avoid this. I’m using Firefox and Mac OSX but the same problem happens using Window XP so I assume it’s platform-independent.

The significance of the validation issue is open to heated debate but it does seem desirable to post pages with valid code where possible.

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