Making the Transition

Apologies for the recent lack of posts, but I’ve been busy finishing off a new site for Presence. This morning I’ve been trying to validate it all as XHTML 1.0 Strict. In the past, I’ve built sites as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but I’ve yet to make to step up to Strict.

Throughout the process I’ve encountered a few problems. Most have been relatively simple to fix, involving the deprecation of attributes from certain elements. Some of these changes were easy to work around by adding extra CSS declarations, such as dropping the border attribute from the <img> tag, but in general I found a lot of tweaks and changes had to made where I’d used forms.

For a kick-off, the name attribute is dropped from the <form> tag, which knackered some included javascript validation. I then had to understand the nesting structure for <input> elements. Redundant <div>’s had to be added to separate <form> tags and their <input>’s, and another block-level element (<p> tags) had to be added around <input> tags within a <noscript> element.

Anyway, it’s nearly all working and valid as XHTML 1.0 Strict (with the belated exception of the home page - which has a flash movie embedded), so (fingers crossed) it should hopefully be live within the next few days.

For your interest, here’s some useful links I found throughout the process —

Posted 6 years, 1 month ago

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My name is Phil Lindsay, a web guy from Scotland, now living in Newcastle upon Tyne in England. I also run a web design company called Presence. You can email me at phil@xlab.co.uk, read more ramblings on my Twitter stream and view my photos on Flickr. You can grab the RSS feed for this weblog here.