Blogless

One particular point of pride for us here at DLB is the fact that we post on BlogLESS six days a week, and we simultaneously manage to keep it valid.

For the most part, once you’ve mentally committed to valid HTML, this kind of feat rarely causes a problem. However, for a very brief moment this fine Wednesday, I thought I’d share with you three fairly non-intuitive things that we’ve run into that caused us validation errors, and what you can do to prevent them.

1. Take the time to learn and understand Flash Satay

Our most regular validation errors come from embedded video. Why these video sites insist on giving us invalid embedding HTML is completely beyond us, but it certainly seems like they all do.

Therefore, one of the most important things you can do to keep your blog valid is to take the time to learn the Flash Satay technique, and understand why it works. That way, you’ll be prepared to do battle with any invalid embeds you might encounter in the future.

You’ve been warned!

2. No special characters in post titles

Once in a while, we’ll be surprised to find that an improperly rendered post title causes BlogLESS to fail validation. Most often this happens because of a non-escaped HTML special character. We’ve found that titles are easy to forget, given the fact that most modern blog engines automatically escape HTML special characters in the post content.

Among these, one of the most insidious is the quotation mark. It’s happened to us at least twice that we’ll simply type a quotation mark into a post title instead of the requisite ", only to find that a handful of title tags around our site completely cease to validate.

3. No special characters in tags

This one had never occurred to us until we ran into it last week. This time, the culprit was an ampersand — we tagged a post "Dungeons & Dragons", and it threw the validator into the familiar yet completely oblique character n is first character of a delimiter but occurred as data followed by XML Parsing Error: xmlParseEntityRef: no name combo.

What happened? Well, duh: we used the plain old plaintext ampersand in lieu of the semantically correct &. Mercy!

Unfortunately, though the w3c parser was finally appeased by our use of the "Dungeons & Dragons" tag, our mod-rewrite script was not. We’ve settled instead for the only slightly less pithy alternative, "Dungeons and Dragons."