canwaf's Journal: Slashdot and webstandards

I've been having problems with Slashdot's rendering in Firefox for a couple of months now. The middle column spilling over in to the leftmost column. General badness when it comes to how the HTML is put into practise.

A friend of mine, trebuchet, told me that somehow Slashdot blocks W3C Validation. Well, to put it to the test, I tried to Validate it, and it turns out to be correct.

First problem:
First off, somehow Slashdot blocks w3c referrer validation.

Second problem:
You can't manage to validate the HTML using a URL directly. Slashdot has blocked all incoming connections from w3c. "403 Forbidden"

Third problem:
You can download a webpage easily in Firefox, right? So I did that and uploaded it to the W3C validator: Apparently Slashdot isn't UTF-8. Thus W3C can not validate it.

Fourth Problem:
After throwing the HTML file through a tidy filter and a DOS2Unix text converter, I upload it again and Slashdot doesn't fare all that well...

File: Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.htm
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 195

Yup, that's 195 inconsistencies with HTML specs. If the Slashdot crowd is so up at arms about IE not supporting standards, how about Slashdot start fixing shop at home?

Well, at least now I know why Slashdot doesn't render right all the time on Firefox... but it does fine on IE.

Firefox slashdot bug

[MarkByers]

I agree with you that slashdot should fix their html, but that's not the reason why it displays badly in Firefox. There is actualy a real bug in Firefox:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21752 7 [mozilla.org]

This bug is confirmed as fixed and the fix will be in the v1.1 release of Firefox. You can also download a nightly to get the fix sooner, or an extension called Slashfix. See comments 145 and 146 of the bug report for further details.

Regards,
Mark Byers.