Message Board

Bugs & Development

XHTML Compliance

Author: D.Lerner (10 Feb 05 9:11pm)

I found a couple of errors in the suggested links, using the W3C Markup Validation service at http://validator.w3.org/

1)

Original link:

<a href="http://example.com/example.php"><img src="example.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></a>

Corrected link:

<a href="http://example.com/example.php"><img src="example.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0" alt="" /></a>

2)

Original link:

<a href="http://example/example.php"><div style="height: 0px; width: 0px;"></div></a>

Corrected link (this works, but there may be a better way of fixing it):

<div style="height: 0px; width: 0px;"><a href="http://example/example.php"></a></div>

After these corrections, all the suggested links passed both the W3C Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ and the W3C CSS Validation Service at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

In case it's relevant, I'm using the following document-type directive:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Re: XHTML Compliance

Author: M.Prince (10 Feb 05 10:15pm)

Cool, thanks for the tip! One of the problems with supporting XHTML is that it can create validation errors for older HTML. For example, the w3.org validator complains about using back slashes to close IMG tags if you're using HTML 4.0 Transitional. We may add some XHTML compliant versions of the links, or maybe let people choose from a pulldown menu what kind of document they're going to be putting the links into and have them adjust appropriately.

Please do not hesitate to change the hidden link styles to fit your needs -- whether making them XHTML-compliant, or trying different formats. We only provide suggestions to help people out. Ideally people would experiment to make it difficult for harvesters to tell what links are ours.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: XHTML Compliance

Author: D.Lerner (12 Feb 05 11:44am)

With document-type HTML 4.0 Transitional, does the w3.org validator fail with <img src ... /> even if there's a space preceding the slash? I thought the presence of the space made that tag compatible with older browsers, although I haven't tested that myself.