Blog Validation: Do You Validate Your (WordPress) Blog?
Most webmasters know that they should take some time out to run validation tools over their website as a matter of course, but if you have a blog that it managed by a system such as Wordpress and has a professionally designed theme, do you still need to do blog validation? I didn’t really think I needed to bother but I thought I’d just have a look anyway…
There’s Only One Way to Find Out
The only way you will know whether or not you need to validate your blog, is if you validate your blog! Recently I have been in a bit of a cleanup mood so I decided to check over the blog with the validation tools provided by the W3C and see how it shaped up.
HTML Validation
The tools are all provided free by the W3C. The HTML Validation tool will check for conformance to HTML and XHTML standards. I hit problems with this straight away. The images that I had inserted to my post lacked an ALT tag. This used to be optional but it now a required attribute.
The ALT tag allows you to attach a text description to an image and this is shown when you mouse over an image, and will be shown in place of the image if images are turned off. For people who are poor sighted and use screen readers, the reader will read out the text within the ALT tag. I was under the impression that Wordpress automatically inserted an empty ALT tag into images but it does not. If you use Wordpress you will be familiar with this screen:
The Image Description field populates the ALT tag as I have shown. This is a nice place to put keywords as long as you don’t overdo it.
CSS Validation
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
The CSS Validator will check your CSS and it’s especially important to do this if you are using a free theme, or like me, you’ve been messing around with it yourself and you’re not an expert! Running this tool highlighted several errors for me - one was something silly I had done with my Top Commentator widget and the other one was a rogue semicolon stuck at the end of my CSS file.
Once I fixed those errors it passed, though I do still have some warnings, 27 of them in fact. They are all the same thing:
Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts .topnav ul li a:hover and blockquote
I suspect this is where there are colours hard coded into several areas of the CSS, eg #40627C. Does anybody know how to get rid of this? As a programmer I loathe these ‘magic numbers’ as we call them. I would much rather be able to define a variable such as ‘headline-colour’ and assign that a value and then use the variable name in my CSS. Can you do that?
RSS Feed Validation
I didn’t know about this one previously and I found an error, well warning, straight away. The warning stated that I should not be using relative URL’s for internal links and that they should be absolute. Now that’s interesting because I thought it was best to use relative paths so I go out of my way to get rid of the server name from the beginning of the URL when I link internally! I guess my thinking is, if I move domains (as I have for other blogs) I won’t break all my links. However, I really can’t see myself changing the domain of this blog. Any thoughts on this?
Link Checker
http://validator.w3.org/checklink
This is worth running once in a while because if you link out externally then you have no control over those links and you never know when they could be moved or taken down. It takes quite a while to run this one and that’s on a blog that’s less than 2 months old so I dread to think how long it would take on a blog that was several years old!
What was interesting about running this was that it picked up all the affiliate links and pointed out that they redirected to something other than the original link. That could be fun to run on other people’s blogs :-)
More Tools From the W3C
Semantic Extractor - Sees a Web page from a semantic point of view. Extracts such information as outline, description, languages used, etc.
RDF Validator - Checks and Visualize RDF documents
P3P Validator - Checks whether a site is P3P enabled and controls protocol and syntax of Policy-Reference-File and Policy
XML Schema Validator
MUTAT - a human-centered testing tool (framework)
Well that’s about it. If you know much about the issues I’ve raised in this post I’d be really grateful if you could leave a comment. Thanks.
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Paul
October 8, 2007
Of course the challenge here is limited coding knowledge for me. I’ll have to sift through this one later.
A line by line and see if I get it. Wish me luck!
Thanks for this one Caroline. Just when ya thought everything was working well…:)