CodeDread Blog » xhtml

How Do You Get Patches Into WordPress

Jeff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:09:35 +0000

Looks like WordPress 2.6 is out. I submitted three patches about three months ago: 6583, 6602 and 6642. I’d like to sturdy up WordPress’s ability to handle invalid XHTML markup. Care to take a whack at my XHTML Piñata? This all sounds vaguely familiar.

Anyway does anyone have any suggestions on how to get these patches moving? Someone I need to email? kthxbai

WordPress: XHTMLation Stalled?

Jeff — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:27:36 +0000

I spent some time a few weeks ago quietly trying to shore up my XHTML defenses on my WordPress install – not everyone is planning to move to Drupal just yet. I have a bunch of patches that are aging. I think three of them are ‘good to go’ but I need someone to look at them. The patch for Ticket 5998 needs some work to make it applicable across trackbacks and pingbacks as well as ensuring it is applicable only for UTF-8. Unfortunately, no one is really looking at the patches because apparently no one on this planet would bother serving WordPress as true XHTML. Anyway, enough whinging – it would be great if some of these could make it into WordPress 2.5.1.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to try and break my WordPress install by injecting funky XHTML, please be my guest on this page. Currently Sam is in the lead with two breakages (now fixed). Oh, and your name doesn’t have to be Philip, Jacques, Mark or Shelley either.

35,000-Year-Old Tools Found

Jeff — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:57:44 +0000

Via CNN. My only question: Did they support XHTML output?

Stimulating WordPress

Jeff — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:05:45 +0000

I think XHTMLate should be pronounced “stimulate”. Anyway, here’s a list of WordPress bugs that I think are important for XHTML:

3833 – Extra </p> inside blockquote
3914, 4746 – Two feeds on Dashboard don’t work with application/xhtml+xml
4466 – Serve application/xhtml+xml if browser compliant
4857 – More issues with wpautop()
5144 – Paragraph end-tag wrongly inserted after object tag
5250 – wpautop() issue with nested lists
5998 – Invalid Unicode characters

I know there are a heap more. I know more will be submitted. This is just what I found when scanning the first few pages of a search for “xhtml”.

I’ve encountered 5144 directly on this blog with my clip art. I’ve found that I have to start the paragraph right after the <object> tag without a newline. A little annoying, but workaround-able.

Shelley just created Bug 5998 right now. This is a bug for WP accepting illegal Unicode code points like U+FFFE, which Jacques so kindly demonstrated.

Sad/Funny sidenote: When he did this, I ran into the very problem that Mark mentioned years ago and I had to poke my WordPress database option to switch back to text/html for the WordPress admin panel so I could correct Jacques’ invalid character. Tail now less bushy…

Bugs From New Theme

Jeff — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:44:21 +0000

Sander asked me to post a list of bugs that I found as a result of working on my new theme. Here they are.

Mozilla Bugs

Bug 418164: Firefox 3 Regression: white-space:pre div forces browser window width
Bug 418305: Enhancement Request: Make Yellow-Screen-Of-Death Follow the Geneva Convention
410820: <svg> elements respond to mouse events when they should not (Not Reported By Me, But Important)

WebKit Bugs

Bug 15214: SVG link with target=”_top” opens new window (FIXED since r25729)
Bug 17423: Enhancement Request: Add support for xml:base
Bug 17424: WebKit Regression: SVG properly positioned only upon Redraw

My Own Fixes

Phil noticed that the side gradients weren’t being displayed in Opera 9.2 or earlier builds of Opera 9.5. I’ve since “fixed” that by explicitly setting the height of the divs to be 100% (with top:0; bottom:0;).
Sander reported that there was an annoying horizontal scrollbar in Firefox (also was in Safari). This was a result of me trying to get the menu to display workably in all browsers, including IE. I have since fixed this.
Sander also pointed out that the » (and «) entity is being shown literally in Opera. This is actually the right thing for Opera to do since XHTML doesn’t define any character references like HTML. I need to wrap my head around this and then either add the entity reference or update my WP theme. Haven’t got to it yet.

Is it sick that I enjoyed putting the site together and tweaking it for all the various browsers out there?

New XHTML+SVG Theme

Jeff — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:01:58 +0000

I’ve been tinkering at a new theme for my website since the Christmas holidays and finally got around to flipping the switch this weekend. I decided to try my hand, for the first time, at real XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml but with PHP content negotiation to text/html for poor ol’ Internet Explorer.

I like the idea of having a seamless transition between my blog and website. so this evening I decided to flip the switch on the blog, even though the WordPress theme is very much a work-in-progress. I still need to figure out what to do with the sidebar, but I can always hack away on the theme on my old blog installation internally and publish updates once they have been verified on a set of decent browsers (Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+).

I use SVG in a bunch of different places: inline as decoration around the page (the blue gradient and the title) and referenced (via <object>) for the icon menu (at the top) and W3C validation badges (at the bottom). Once I nail down all the particulars, I’ll compress menu.svg and serve only menu.svgz so it can be neatly cached (at roughly 15kb). But I’ll keep menu.svg around for web developers to look at if they’re curious.

Work on this led to a few bugs reported at Mozilla, WebKit and Opera – but no show stoppers. The best user experience is in Opera 9.5. For the first time, I’m using declarative animation (in a simple way) for icon mouse-hovering. Firefox and Safari users miss out for now, unfortunately.

It turns out, as Shelley has mentioned, that the best developer experience to work on XHTML is also (by far) Opera. Instead of Firefox’s “yellow screen of death” we’re greeted with Opera’s “light grey screen of mild achiness”. Instead of cryptic messages about unexpected tags, the element which failed to be terminated and the tag that broke the XML parsing are highlighted for you.

I encountered some funniness when I tried to validate my pages on the W3C Validator. Apparently it thought they were text/html pages. So I had to add a little catch in my PHP content negotiation code to force application/xhtml+xml when I want to. Anyway, the PHP content negotiation code looks like this:

<?php
if( (!stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"],”application/xhtml+xml”) &&
     !isset($_GET['xhtml'])) || $_GET['xhtml'] === ’0′ )
{
  header(“Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8″);
  header(“Vary: Accept”);
  printf(“<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \”-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN\”".
    ” \”http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd\”>\n”);
  printf(“<html lang=\”en\”>\n”);
}
else
{
  header(“Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml;charset=utf-8″);
  header(“Vary: Accept”);
  printf(“<” . “?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”UTF-8\” ?” . “>\n”);
  printf(“<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN\”" .
    ”\”http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd\”>\n”);
  printf(“<html xmlns=\”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\” xmlns:svg=\”http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\”" .
    ” xmlns:xlink=\”http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\” xml:lang=\”en\”>\n”);
}
?>

You might find some of my old site themes amusing, sad, or boring:

2004-04 – Early static HTML, table-based layout, no CSS.
2005-04 – Reworked into a templated PHP site. Eventually I turned it from table-based to CSS layout-based (snapshot is table-based).
2006-01 – Theme from 2006. Using CSS for layout. Embedded SVG aqua buttons for navigation menus. All modern browsers now support the features I was using on this page.