After a long time of fixing errors on the site, I am proud to say that Free Culture News is now valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Almost all errors were caused by editors (myself included) copying and pasting code from other sites, code which either was not XHTML 1.0 Strict, was poorly written in its own right, or depended on other aspects of the copied site.

So to all editors: Please, please, please make sure that your code doesn’t break the page. The most preferable way in my opinion to do this is to paste in stuff from other sites as plain text. To do this, click the “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” button on the WordPress Post toolbar (it’s the rightmost toolbar button), then click the “Paste as Plain Text” button (the clipboard with a “T” on it) instead of using CTRL+V. This is sure to avoid a significant portion of all errors. Also please verify that your posts are valid by either visiting the link above after posting (it also lives at the bottom of the site) or uploading the raw code in the HTML tab to the W3C Validator, just in case.

If you’re feeling adventures, click the link for a detailed report of the most common errors I found and how I fixed them.

1. Error: there is no attribute “border”.

   Fix: Remove the border=”0″ attribute in img tag

2. Error: there is no attribute “target”.

   Fix: Change every instance of target=”$TARGET” to onclick=”target=’$TARGET’;”

3. Error: there is so attribute “align”.

   Fix: Change align=”$ALIGN” to class=”align$ALIGN”

4. Error: end tag for element “p” which is not open.

   Fix: This is a symptom of one of many WordPress bugs. This happened to me when the post contained either a div, span, or hr tag. A workaround for the div tag is to place a line break between the start and end tags, like so:

   < div >

   stuff

   < /div >

   I could not find workarounds for the other tags, so I had to delete them.

5. Error: end tag for “span” omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.

   Fix: Delete span tags. See above.

6. Error: tag p omitted

   Fix: See above.

7. Error: XML blah blah blah

   Fix: Symptom of above errors. Fix above errors and these go away.

There are still errors in the comment pages that have more than one comment, but that’s something I can’t fix right now. It’s a bug in WordPress, not the comments themselves. If anyone else knows how I can fix these pages, please leave a comment.