Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

You may have noticed yesterday this site’s not displaying the background. This post is in two halves: 1) implications for typical users of Zoundry and Wordpress, and after the (more…) 2) My notes to investigate why this happened. The latter half of this post is more technical.

Symptoms: a) the site’s background chocolate wrapper image appeared over the text in place of a white background, making the site hard to read. b) the sidebar got thrown out of whack, to the bottom of the screen.

When I finally solved it I concluded that it happened because I’d cut and paste web content from a page into the Designer view of Zoundry and innocently inserted the “extended entry marker” into the text.

It wasn’t until I went back into Zoundry and manually re-edited the content in XHTML mode to strip out some weird <div> tags did the site resume to normal.

This means that authors pasting content from internet sources need to 1) switch to Zoundry’s XHTML technical view 2) run validate and 3) possibly read the XHTML looking for weird divs etc before posting. That’s too much to ask of many people.

As WordPress provides no means to retrospectively detect weird constructs in postings, there’s not much in WordPress that can help. Perhaps there is plugin that can present all postings and any compliance problems. The suggestion I received on IRC to “Edit and save the post within WP” didn’t solve the problem, even after I checked the option to “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically.”

This has left me in a quandary of what blog editor to recommend to people. Zoundry’s validator needs improvement before it is totally user-proof, but its much better than editing in WordPress. I wonder how resilient blog posting from Word 2007 will be. I guess I should try it.

How I resolved the problem:

1. Switched skin. This hid the errors from normal users.
2. Running the validator first on the index page and then on a couple of individual posts, and showed where the errors originated
3. The validator report showed that there were errant div classes in the HTML
4. I asked on IRC. (#wordpress)
5. I looked at the posts in the database
6. I republished from Zoundry.

It turned out it was screwing the aggregated view as a particular post had a <div> either side of the <!–more–> split so there was an unclosed div in the index view.

The real problem is that such div codes invisible to users, who will cut and paste from web pages without any idea that they are picking them up. These divs are meaningless without the supporting CSS files.

I discovered that Zoundry will let me validate the post, but in my case it said “2 errors”, without telling me what the errors are. Not helpful.

1. If validation is required, then it should be part of Zoundry’s posting process
2. Zoundry should warn me about div’s and span’s with classes (& I should be able to teach it about new ones of these)
3. Zoundry should not allow divs and spans to be split by the <!–more–> tag

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Blogsite, wordpress, coding, Blogging, Windows Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.