Not yet compliant
by Volker Weber
I worked a little bit on my templates tonight in order to make the site compliant with the XHTML specification. That is almost done. I do need to work on one item and that is the HTML entity for ampersand. This character is often used in URLs and I don't want to handcode those when linking somewhere else. MT has to do that for me. Once I figured out how I can do that, I will fix the archive templates as well and regenerate the site.
Comments
Try the Validable plugin.
From the description:
- Convert all & in the text to & (unless they are &something;)
- Convert all &, " and ' in tag attribute values to the corresponding entities
But there is more:
What it does
This plugin corrects many of the most common 'invalid' constructs by applying the following changes:
- Convert all tag names to lowercase
- Use double quotes for all tag attribute values
- Attributes without a value (i.e. DEFER or ISMAP) are assigned their own name as default value.
- Close IMG, BR and HR tags using shorthand ()
- Adds an empty ALT attribute to images without an ALT.
- Remove MT's automatic <P> when they enclose a block element like BLOCKQUOTE, PRE, H{x} or even another P.
- Remove MT's automatic <BR> just after those block elements
- plus the above ampersand stuff
I haven't tried out this plugin yet, but will very soon.
For more MT plugins, check the MT Plugins Directory
Sounded interesting, so I just tried it out. FYI - perhaps not surprisingly, it didn't seem to coexist with John Gruber's SmartyPants (http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/smartypants_11.html) - at least, I didn't spend very long investigating it, but the first try resulted in all the various quote symbols getting displayed as &xxxx; on my blog.
Could well be that I did something silly and I will probably try again over Easter...
