Re: XHTML in the real world

Sue Sims wrote:

> On Thu, 02 Oct 2003 11:08:48 -0400, Bob Clary <bc@bclary.com> wrote:
> 
>> How do we deal with sites like this?
> 
> 
>> <http://news.com.com/>
>> <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.com.com%2F>
> 
> 
>> Does anyone want to take the lead in contacting them and asking them 
>> to produce valid XHTML. I would love to a) hear their response and b) 
>> see the site corrected.
> 
> 
> I'd like to contact them. It seems to me that ~98% of those validation 
> errors are from bare ampersands. Should be easy to correct, especially 
> if I also point them to Tidy.
> 
> Sue

Sue,

Thanks! Although most of the reported errors are due to the use of 
ampersands in URLs, there is a mixture of other issues involved here.

This is a news site with it's own content management system and teams of 
authors/editors. Getting them to change the way they do business is more 
than having them run tidy over a single document.

The errors which are not due to the use of ampersands range from missing 
endtags, to improper case, to missing quotes on attributes, to 
improperly placed elements. (Not to mention the use of SGML comments 
surrounding the inline script) In fact, this document is HTML tag soup 
and not even close to XHTML at all. To get them to fix the issue in 
general will take some effort on their part to change the way content is 
authored and published.

Good Luck and let us know what they say.

/bc