[LINK] Removing Validation Errors from Google Blogger With HTML 5

[Tom Worthington]

Andy Farkas wrote (was: "Re: [LINK] IT matters of interest in the
2010/2011 Federal Budget"):
> Hi Tom, Again I tried to read your blog page but was blinded by a bright
> background of unreadable text. Your web pages do not set a font
> colour. ...

The change I made to the style sheet may take some time to
propagate through caches. The CSS should be now setting the text to
black on a light blue background:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20102011.html>.

> When I ran *your* page through the validator ... it reports "53 Errors, 30 warning(s)"

Apologies. It is difficult to generate valid HTML using Google's
Blogger, but I think I have managed it now. The Blog posting in question
passes with no validation errors:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.tomw.net.au%2F2010%2F05%2Fit-matters-of-interest-in-20102011.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>.

I changed to a new version of Blogger recently, which may have been a
mistake. I assumed by now that Google would be generating HTML code
without errors in it. But when I replaced my hacked template with one of
Google's new ones, instead of dozens of errors, I got hundreds.

After looking at some articles on the topic, the way to avoid validation
errors seems to be to avoid Google generated code. So I cut away most of
the Google template.

At the same time I thought I would try out HTML 5. This seems to reduce
the amount of custom code Blogger generates for fixing idiosyncrasies in
particular browsers and so reduces the amount of code with validation
errors in it.

I am not sure if less code is being generated because HTML 5 is a better 
standard, more standardised browsers have been created, or so few are 
using it the problems have not yet been found. Also the HTML5
validator does not seem to be finding as many errors as the XHTML one,
perhaps because HTML 5 is less rigid in its syntax, because the checker
is better (not finding spurious errors) or is worse (not finding real
errors).

Apart from HTML validation, there are still problems with my blog for 
CSS validation and Mobile compatibility (the blog only scores 64% for 
mobile web  compatibility). Some of these I can't fix, such as Blooger 
inserting a style sheet with an error in it and settings in the HTTP 
header. Perhaps it is time to change to a more standards compliant blog 
system.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890