WordPress Themes, Plugins and XHTML Compliance

The vast majority of WordPress themes available today claim to be valid XHMTL, and indeed I have no reason to disbelieve any author who makes this statement. Problems seem to arise when you have a particular theme + a range of plugins activated and XHTML validity goes out the window. Now this may be caused by the theme, individual plugins, combinations of plugins or indeed certain theme/plugin combinations, I’m not sure. A recent example on my own site where one theme throws up 5 errors on W3C Validator and with the same plugin combination another theme throws 85 errors, whilst a 3rd has no errors. I won’t name the themes but you can see my point, as both themes claim to be valid XHTML. When a theme generates a small number of errors I will attempt to fix them but in cases where there are large numbers of errors I simply won’t bother.

IE 7

I downloaded and installed IE 7 yesterday, not because I particularly wanted to but like it or not it will be shipped in most new PCs soon and will become the most common browser. So if you build web sites etc. you need to test on IE 7. The first thing that struck me was the extremely long installation time, the installer downloaded fairly fast but it wasn’t clear if all the files needed for installation were downloaded then or whether some were downloaded during the installation. Also, during the installation there was no options available, such as quit or pause, once you’d started you had to finish. For no apparent reason the menu bar is hidden by default and strangely appears now an again for some reason, I have now figured how to turn it on. It also broke my site layout, which works fine with FF and Opera so I guess we’re still going to have to write workarounds for IE.

Island living…Well maybe.

Some time last year we heard that the National Trust for Scotland were looking for families to live on Fair Isle, one of the islands owned and managed by NTS. We thought about it long and hard but in the end decided Fair Isle was perhaps a little too remote, even for us. Since then we have often talked about moving to the western isles, possibly Skye and have looked at many properties. Then last Sunday I bought the Sunday Times, which I havn’t done for ages and there was an article about the people who had moved to Fair Isle last year. In addition there was information that NTS were going to be looking for two families to live on another of their properties, the Isle of Canna in the inner Hebrides, a small island to the south west of Skye. We are not fooling ourselves that this will be easy or in fact we will get selected as we know there will be a lot of applicants but we are hopefull and have sent for the information pack and application forms, so keeeping fingers crossed.