tag archive: standards

I try to make standards-compliant web pages here at movingtofreedom.org. It appeals to my petty, detail-oriented side. The compiler in me loves it when W3C or xmllint or tidy reports a valid web page. A pass from xmllint or tidy, or the green “valid” result from W3C is like a pat on the head. Good boy!

Why do I use XHTML for this place? Because that’s what WordPress templates were using when I started this site in 2006. I’m sure that’s still the case today, although some searching tells me it doesn’t have to be that way. XHTML seemed like the thing to do three years ago and I was happy to learn about it and conform to the transitional XHTML doctype. I wasn’t so excited about the strict doctype, but figured that was a concern for another day.

(Tangentially, an obscure poem recently made me aware of standards upheaval on the horizon involving the death of XHTML 2 and the emergence of HTML 5. I was surprised — although …

WordPress is very good about supporting standards and producing valid markup, and at least when I started using it, it had a link in the standard theme to proclaim the validity of its pages and prove it to you by taking you to the W3C Markup Validation Service. A lot of people never pay this any attention and promptly produce a bunch of non-complying pages, all the while shamefully leaving the boastful link in the sidebar or footer of their site.

Being a retentive sort about many things, I’ve always worked to ensure my pages validate correctly, looking for the below highly satisfying message on each and every one of these posts that I strive mightily to create for you:

(Versus the alternative which is highlighted with red instead of green, and tells you that you are not just inadequate but are a bad person as well.)

But this can be a tedious chore. In order to validate by …

Update, 16 February 2008: Converting PDFs into Image Files (Citimortgage PDF Reprise)

I highly doubt I’ll get any satisfaction from Citimortgage on this, so I’ll just complain ineffectually here.

Up till now, I’ve been able to view and save my monthly and other related mortgage statements with the Evince viewer in Ubuntu 7.04. Today I logged on to find that the PDFs no longer display correctly. I get a blank form with no data. I tried on my Windows XP instance in VirtualBox and Adobe complains about a missing font, but still shows the data. I tried in Ubuntu 7.10 with the same problem as 7.04.

That really bites.

The other thing that has always sucked about Citimortgage PDFs is that they’re extremely bloated. Previously they’ve weighed in at 900KB, and now the January statement is 1.6MB. This is ridiculous, and an annoying burden on my storage overhead. Although I guess if I can’t view them anymore, then I don’t …