Sometimes I wonder

August 9, 2011 by Michael
Filed under: Allgemeines ...

WordPress – the blog software for millions of blogs is so widely used that it almost resembles a standard. And so you should think that the internet in general and WordPress plugin creators in particular would acknowledge this fact.
Fact? Not so.

What is it about?
Anyone who uses Wodrpress will know that unmodified WordPress produces pages in XHTML strict.
Consequently plugin writers whose plugins run in, with, on and under WordPress should add the capability to produce valid XHTML strict as one of the core features naturally, without even thinking about it.
They do! – Do they???

In the meantime I have stumbled on some bad guys who will output anything BUT XHTML strict…
For some of those this is it. The effort to fix them is not worth the features they promise.

With disqus (www.disqus.com) a social commenting plugin I had to take a different route – this tool is just too cute to miss it…
Disqus replaces standard Worpress commenting functionality and it does not require the commenter to register for yet another user account; instead a commenter can use his own facebook-, google-, twitter-, yahoo- oder openID account for logging in and leaving a comment. Neat thing – and barriers are lower once again.

Unofrtunately this plugin produces validation errors on pages and posts that do not yet have a comment – however small (a /<ul-tag without following /<li)it is a validation error nonetheless. This means that the post will dive deeper in google than it would have to – and with that its chances to receive any comment will sink, too.

Its a pity. This error is an easy one to fix – if they had ever wanted to.

The culprit is in “comments.php” and the fix is inserting the following two lines:
After line 14: <div id=”dsq-content”>
insert: <?php if ($comments): ?>

and after line 33: </ul>
insert: <?php endif; ?>

That would have been it – if they had wanted to.

Your result (bells and whistles here, please): validator.w3.org (or any other validator) finally shows green.

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