[dev] How to ensure XHTML compliance

[Kevin M. Myer]

Is there any automated testing in place to validate the HTML that Horde 
generates?  I've been meaning to ask that for some time, but haven't 
gotten around to it.  For instance, awhile back, I noticed the issues 
described in bug #3038, with the display of patches and other lined 
items.  And I noticed that IE didn't handle display of patches very 
well at all.  But since about the only time I use IE is to test if 
something works in it, I never spent the time to track down why they 
didn't display properly.  When I did take the time last weekend to do 
it, it was made a lot simpler because I've been using the HTML 
Validator extension for Firefox 
(http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/), which is based on Tidy.  For 
every page that loads, it parses the HTML and displays a summary of 
Errors and Warnings and it was pretty easy to see that with a missing 
DOCTYPE, the entire header was missing as well.  Most pages generate 
warnings and I'm wondering to what degree of XHTML compliance Horde 
strives for.  Are pedantic things like:

<a> attribute "id" has invalid value "1"
The attribute ID is of type ID. As described above, it should begin 
with a letter

of concern?

Just wondering if its worth my time to investigate the warnings, or if 
things are compliant enough as is...  If just a few people used Horde 
with that extension for a little while, a lot of minor non-compliant 
HTML might be caught, but at the same time, you could go crazy with 
some of the pedantic compliant issues as well.

Kevin

-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13  http://www.iu13.org