Web Validation

Arrgh. Sometimes keeping up with HTML validation drives me crazy. Again I've managed to mung a whole bunch of pages so that they won't validate. It was the author of Cross-Platform Compatibility Testing On One Machine Without Rebooting who pointed out the failure on his article after it was reformatted for this site, but the problem was deep in code I've been using for quite a while. Actually, there was more than one problem, but I tracked it all down and corrected all of them (all my fault - nothing from his html). His page will now validate - that is, until someone adds a comment and forgets to close a <p> tag or commits some other awful transgression.

Of course I'll go fix the comment - if I notice, which is not always the case. In the meantime, I have several hundred other screwed up postings to attend to. Way too much to do by hand, so I need to take the time to write something that can "see" the specific errors and fix them. That kind of thing requires careful attention to detail - I don't want to make things worse.

It's times like this when I will wistfully consider Content Management Systems. The problem, as I've noted many times, is that they never do exactly what I want, so I have to dig into their innards anyway. That leaves me open to the same kind of stupid errors I make on my own, and also gives me the other guy's weaknesses and foulups. Still.. it's very tempting. At least I could expect consistency in the validation of pages..

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