something to chew on: That is a MediaWiki page, not a WordPress page, go complain to MediaWiki that they don’t output W3c “valid” pages.
Ultimately frontend W3C validation comes down to the theme in use, as you’re aware. WordPress template functions themselves will often output valid XHTML (Some older functions output valid HTML I believe, which is still fine in a XHTML Transitional doctype), which may, or may not validate depending on how you use it within your theme.
The WordPress Admin area does not validate, not because it’s not a “valid” structure, but because WordPress as a whole has decided to support a set of draft HTML changes to increase accessibility for screen readers/etc (amongst other things). As a result, the admin doesn’t validate. But something to chew on: Is validation really the end-all? Surely a usable website is worth more than a “strictly to the standards” wesbite. I mean, We could all still be running on the “Websafe” colour schemes too..
I’ve seen plenty of themes which validate correctly, and plenty of correctly validating themes which break something bad when a plugin inserts invalid HTML, or the user pastes MSWord content into TinyMCE (Which is always doomed to fail thanks to the office XML markups). In most cases, the site will still look and render fine, but will fail the validation.
“something to chew on: That is a MediaWiki page, not a WordPress page, go complain to MediaWiki that they don’t output W3c “valid” pages.”
ooops, my bad. I take that particular one back.
On the thingee about validation, I tend to agree with you. The real reason I brought it up is that I was trying to help a buddy out who bought one of those “theme-mill” themes (aren’t they all), and found that no matter how much I played with .htaccess and default site settings, I couldn’t get that theme’s slider to show up on first load in Chrome (dom vs. page load). After tweaking some of the css a bit, presto magic, and it worked. The main thing that got me though, was that the site that milled that particular theme states right on their homepage that all their themes validate 100%. You and I know better, of course, but your average idiot with an idiot’s guide to blogging probably doesn’t.
Keep up the great work (I use your add from server plugin)!
P.S. I’d like to think that any theme right out of the box that claims validation should validate on first go after install. Then, I like to think that I don’t need to lose any weight and at almost 60, I’m still a great looking guy who could give some twenty-somethings a run for their money ;*)
…that is, if I didn’t pass as much gas as I do. Aging and intestinal fortitude sometimes go hand-in-hand.
> Keep up the great work (I use your add from server plugin)!
Thanks 🙂
> P.S. I’d like to think that any theme right out of the box that claims validation should validate on first go after install.
I fully agree with you, In order for WordPress themes to get into the official WordPress.org Repo, there are a few rules they have to pass, unfortunately, those rules can’t be applied to other hosting sites, etc. Many of the older themes in the repo may not adhere to them either.
There’s a set of checklist items for authors to go through here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development_Checklist If every theme was to go through each point in those pages, the WordPress themeing world would be a much better(Well, Cleaner) place 🙂
