Wordpress, plugins and validation

CMS & WordPress
1

I have noticed with almost all the handful of plugins that I tried including Sharethis, several flikr plugins and a couple of twitter plugins they generate validation errors.

I’ve recently moved to WordPress after building a few static sites and got into the habit of trying hard to validate my pages. I’ve also used it like many others to problem-solve especially in the early stages, when a page isn’t behaving itself. Now with WordPress, validation seems a lot more slippery.

I see things like non-standard attributes: there is no attribute “st_title”
improper nesting: document type does not allow element “link” here and the one that makes me lose most sleep, incomplete tags: end tag for “img” omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified

If I get validation errors from using plugins, what should I do? At the moment, fixing them myself is a bit too much but I’m hoping that one day, it might be achievable.

Thanks for your interest

Martin

PS just what is “OMITTAG NO” in the validator?

2

I believe the OMITTAG is from when HTML tags are in a XHTML page. eg.
<meta> instead of <meta/>
<img> instead of <img/>
<br> instead of <br/>
etc.

Last I knew, WordPress failed validation with the
There is No Role Attribute

But IMHO the validator is a tool, not necessarily a Must, as long as you understand the why.

The sad part about it is that although it’s XHTML blogs are almost always served as HTML anyway making the argument for validity rather moot.

3

Thanks for your help Mittineague,

I think, I am going to stop worrying about it. Mind you it freaks me a bit when you add 3 or 4 3rd party plugins and end up with another 20 or 30 validation errors.

Maybe it reminds me too much of my old school reports - all that Red Pen!

Martin

4

To me it depends on what the errors are. And the numbers can go up quick.

For example one URL with an “&” instead of “&” or a single unclosed tag might cause 3 validation error messages each, making the tiotal 6 for the 2.

I guess most browsers do a pretty good job of figuring out what was intended. But any time you get quirky bugs, especially of the CSS kind, its often because the browser guessed wrong.

So its still a good idea to get things as close to the standards as much as can be reasonably expected.
That is, make your own code as near perfect as you can, and other’s as much time and energy as you’re willing and able to put into it.