This morning I got a Twitter DM from @refresholympia that an anonymous tipper noticed this site wasn’t validating. I guess when you say you’re going to present at an event about web standards, the nitpickers come out of the woodwork. I’ve been that person myself a few times, and I think it takes a few go-arounds with big and/or long-lived sites to get a little humility about how these things happen. So I’m annoyed that anon didn’t say anything directly, but otherwise ::shrug:: it’s all cool by me.
As a note to others and for myself in the future, here’s what was broken:
- Unescaped ampersands in my flickr badge, which is a lesson about (a) the fussiness of ampersands and (b) the pitfalls of using other people’s code. You can’t guarantee that any widget will be doing the right thing, standards-wise. An easy fix, though.
- Illegal style element in the body, just above the goodreads badge. See (b) above. Also easy, just copied the CSS rules into my main stylesheet.
- Unclosed archive list ul. D’oh! That would be all me…and it’s been that way for a damn long time, I imagine. Typo FAIL. And the lesson? Always check your work.
I’m thinking my presentation is going be something about “standards: not from scratch” about getting it right in an environment of CMS apps and widgets. 😉