Making the reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin Validate
If you are like us, you want to harness the awesome power of reCAPTCHA for your Wordpress blog and you also want valid XHTML. Before now, this was impossible. DLB is pleased to offer you a fix, and continue doing our bit to make the web a more standardized place.
Background
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer, by asking the user to copy some distorted text. You've probably seen them, either here, or elsewhere on the web. If not, just click here for an example.
reCAPTCHA gets these words from books that the Internet Archive is digitizing. Digitizing books is done by photographically scanning the book's pages, and then transforming these scans into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR).
All this together means that when you leave a comment, in addition to contributing to the discussion, you are both proving you are a person, not a spambot, and helping humanity's effort to archive it's knowledge digitally.
The Problem
Which is all milk and honey, but there's a problem. As good citizens of the web, and as Wordpress users, BlogLESS utilizes reCAPTCHA's handy Wordpress Plugin. But, as good citizens, BlogLESS is further committed to web standards. This means that all our HTML and CSS needs to be valid. Unfortunately, the Wordpress reCAPTCHA plugin doesn't validate XHTML out of the box. (As it turns out, this is not its fault. It actually can't validate out of the box, which we'll see.)
The good news is, the fix is easy, once you understand the problem. You don't need to be a pro to make your Wordpress comments template valid again.
| Tagged with: | CSS, HTML, Javascript, Plugins, reCAPTCHA, Spiderman, The Internet Archive, Validation, Web Standards, Wordpress |