Dancing for validation.
The primary reason why I wanted to change my blogging space was standards compliance. It can be nightmare-like to try and validate every document but over the long-haul I think it’s worthwhile. It’s sort of like processing for archival permanence in photography. As long as a page is compliant with an existing standard, then it will be readable in the future rather than degenerating into unreadable code.
The second reason was accessibility. Without standards compliance, accessibility is impossible. Web accessibility is built on a variety of things, and I remember getting really irritated in my web-writing class regarding the issues surrounding using graphics and images. I thought to myself— I’m not constructing my pages for blind people. How can you describe an image adequately? Captions and such partially destroy the reason for using an image to begin with—they do work that words cannot do— things that words interfere with. I refuse to give-up my non-descriptive captioning privileges. However, faced with the failing eye-sight of my brother and parents (though I’m not designing for them, either) it seems prudent to include things like dynamic text sizing to help those who don’t desire to squint at tiny-tiny-type.
Standards compliance can be a real nightmare if you are used to little things like, er, punctuation. I like composing in Word, because the spell check is unobtrusive and my dictionary is filled with all the weird words I commonly use and I can’t spell worth shit. I also like the “smart quotes” thing too. However, my easy cut-and-paste days are gone. Now I have to worry about character entities. I’ve memorized the em-dash, since I use it so frequently, but now there’s the apostrophe situation to deal with, on top of the quote problem. I suppose this is as good of an excuse as any to start figuring out how to use the macros in Word. I don’t mean to be so anal about this junk, but I think regular straight-quotes are ugly, and I don’t want to give up my short-and-curlies, especially now that I have a more ornate font— and I certainly don’t want to exchange using a word-processor for typing on the screen.
A few quick words about the template— I decided that I was thinking about this mess as an amorphous, massive textual blob. Entry after entry was beginning to run-together into a sort of associational conceptual soup. I liked it, but I was getting too comfortable with it. Comfort is sometimes a danger sign. So, in order to shake myself up, I decided to shift into more of a rustic missive, epistolary look. Think of it like scraps of paper, or little postcards.
I have disabled the track-back feature for now, not for the reasons Professor Salo noted, but because of its problems with standards compliance. Though I prefer new windows for links, I decided to go with the flow and make links open in the same window. There is a checkbox now, for those who prefer the old way. It eliminates the JavaScript problem with the old blog. Mostly though, the software change was brought about because I decided it was time to start learning correct grammar for the web.
I do have a bone to pick with the validator (or the standards, really). Who decided you can’t have a block quote inside a paragraph? I do it all the time, and now I must adjust my habits to make the validator say it’s okay.
It’s funny how weirdly-designed markup forces some very strange compromises. I’ve worked with several DTDs that included tags for the “continuing paragraph,” to deal with the blockquote problem you note.
I told markup guru Allen Renear about this, and he said, “Ain’t no such thing in nature.” Well, he’s right… but any markup system that rigidly enforces no-blocks-within-blocks is going to have this problem.