I really should have known better. All the comments on my Emprix post are spam. But not just any spam. Cyrillic spam! I’m glad I made this a moderated blog, so none of the worst stuff made it through at all.

I was having fun brushing up on my Russian. I checked every site, and if it seemed legitimate, I let it through. And of course it didn’t hurt that almost all of the comments were very complimentary. “Very interesting.” “Lots to think about.” “A hearty thank-you for posting this.” All in Russian.

Then, there were the not-exactly-complimentary, but not offensive comments: “doesn’t show correctly in Internet Explorer”, “a lot is superfluous.”

Oh well. I wonder if there is a way to block Russian spam without blocking everything in Russian.

I just set up a LinkedIn poll at http://polls.linkedin.com/p/21934/opugr about the language(s) your LinkedIn profile is in. I’m not sure wheter you need to be on LinkedIn to vote. Either way, it would be great if you left a comment about the poll here.

http://www.jobsinmadison.com/default.asp had 1346 validation errors when checked as xhtml 1.0 transitional on February 6, 2009. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

For an analysis of the validation errors, and a version of the page with all validation errors corrected, please see jobsinmadison analysis. A side effect of achieving validation was that the page then passed the first stage of Section 508 validation and was parsable by the Semantic Data Extractor.

http://emprixcorp.com/ had 15 validation errors when checked as xhtml 1.0 transitional today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.
The errors were:

required attribute “alt” not specified: 8 errors

The “alt” tag was not specified for 8 images.

element “embed” undefined: 1 error

Use of <embed> produces invalid markup.

there is no attribute X: 6 errors

Since <embed> is not valid XHTML, all the attributes for this element are also invalid.

possible rewrite to replace the “embed” element

The 9 errors related to using the invalid embed element are caused by the shockwave flash movie used to provide the rotating globe in the logo, an swf file that is only 50k in size.

The area of the code causing the problem is the “embed” element. However the fix will require rewriting some of the object markup as well.

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/ ... #version=7,0,19,0" width="303" height="65">
<param name="movie" value="images/EMPRIX_LOGO_GLOBE.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<embed src="images/EMPRIX_LOGO_GLOBE.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="303" height="65">
</embed>
</object>


Alternative that should validate:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="images/EMPRIX_LOGO_GLOBE.swf"
width="400" height="300">
<param name="movie" value="images/EMPRIX_LOGO_GLOBE.swf" />
</object>

Note that this markup replaces the markup within the <object>, not just that within the <embed> element.

The above markup would be somewhat different for a large flash movie to allow IE to stream the movie. There is also a fix that allows the movie to play while also prompting the user to update their flash player, if necessary. An explanation of why the above markup works, and how to incorporate either or both of those fixes can be found at Flash Satay, an article at A List Apart.

http://getsongbird.com/ checked as valid xhtml 1.0 strict today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

http://www.apple.com/ had 1 validation error when checked as HTML 4.01 Transitional today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

The error was:

value of attribute “TYPE” cannot be “SEARCH”

path: home.decor.globalheader.globalnav.globalsearch.g-search.sp-searchtext, global search input field id “sp-searchtext”

Existing code:


<input id="sp-searchtext" class="g-prettysearch applesearch" type="search" accesskey="s" name="q" autocomplete="off"/>


The use of “search” for the value of the input type attribute is being considered for html 5 (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/).

It is currently a WebKit specific type. WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications (http://webkit.org/).

http://automattic.com/ checked as valid xhtml 1.0 strict today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

http://wordpress.com/ checked as valid xhtml 1.0 transitional today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

http://wordpress.org/ checked as valid xhtml 1.0 transitional today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.

http://www.webgui.org/ checked as valid xhtml 1.0 strict today. Only the page loaded by this url was checked.