Bb's RealTech

Wordpress 2.5 has released, including the bad markup generated with the Gallery option. If you serve your pages up as XHTML, the gallery won't work for you. You will get invalid markup errors, the page will fail to load. Whether this can be fixed with a plug-in or not, I don't know.

I've been told that if I don't like the code, shut up, and *fix it myself. Leaving aside the "shut up" part, the issue isn't just one problem in one piece of code–it has to do with a mindset. Last time I looked, you can't submit a bug patch to change a mindset.

I did turn in a bug about the Gallery markup, and really did expect it to be fixed. Two people involved in Wordpress 2.5, Jeffrey Zeldman and Matt Mullenweg have professionally benefited by their association with WaSP and the standards movement. If I seemed harsh in my previous writing on this, it is because I really did expect better from both Jeffrey and Matt. I think, though, my expectations don't match today's reality. Today's reality is XHTML is out, HTML5 is in. HTML5 is much more marketable. HTML5 is sexy, HTML5 is hot, HTML5 sells.

I know many of my readers are tired of me bringing up standards and XHTML. On and on–I have become dull with repetition. Heck, I've just become dull. Several people have pointed out the draconian error handling of XHTML, how HTML5 is friendlier, and will "make things better". HTML5 will make the web more "semantic". HTML5 is the way of the future.

How can the web be better, though, when people who do know how to create valid web pages, choose to not do so because frankly they just can't be bothered? How can HTML5 make the web more meaningful, when it can't even guarantee something as simple as accuracy of syntax? As the spec is now, HTML5 is also a closed box, with no way to add something new, something different. With XHTML, I can add SVG, or RDF, or NextBigVocabulary, or ShelleysSecretSauceVocab, and it works, out of the box. You can't do that with HTML5. Is HTML5 really a way forward? Or just a way for application developers to continue dishing out crap–but gee wiz, look, you can store data on the client now. And if you make a mistake, you won't kill kittens, because goodness knows, every time Firefox displays the Yellow Screen of Death, God kills a kitten.

I once before referred to today's attitude about standards as being a race to the bottom. I made this statement because standards support is seemingly a thing of the past, a quaint relic of a previous web generation. The new web, the 3.0 web, the semantic web can't be bothered with the old, the measured, and the fusty, when now is a time of quick ideas and even quicker implementations. Open Social! Open Data! Microformats! All you need now, is an idea and an audience. It doesn't have to be a good idea, either, but it does have to have a big audience.

It is what it is, and I don't have enough audience to impact much beyond my immediate vicinity. Thankfully for the riders of tomorrow's web, when they do reach the bottom, HTML5 will be there, waiting for them. And who knows, I could very well be all wrong about all of this. Rather than a race for the bottom, perhaps this is a race for a baseline, and I just perceive the baseline to be less than what I think it can be. Perhaps I do reflect an era that is dead and gone and either I should adapt to move with the tide, or get out of the boat.

Well, I've not been particularly good at floating with the current in the past, so the only option for me is get out of the boat–or at a minimum, go find my own boat to row. I am going to do the Wordpress folks a huge favor: I won't continue using Wordpress, no matter how pretty the new look, or how cool the new features. The Wordpress developers have made too many decisions about how I should run my site, including HTML5 over XHTML, microformats over RDF, the canvas element over SVG, and so on. I find I just don't want to follow the course they've deemed appropriate for the future. Or, to continue my nautical metaphor, we've reached an equatorial point, and Wordpress wants one horizon and I want another and now, regretfully, we must part.

I am not unmindful of how much I owe the Wordpress team for an application I've benefited from for several years. To the Wordpress team, my sincere thanks for the use of your application, and your hard work in the past. Wordpress has been both fun, and useful. Good luck with your future voyages.

*If you want to use the Gallery yourself and you serve your pages up as XHTML, you can fix the gallery page so that it doesn't break in the browser with this PHP file. Just rename it to media.php and overlay the one in wp-includes. You'll also have to turn off automatic entry formatting, too, because Wordpress will insert paragraph elements erroneously. The Text Control plug-in will help you with turning off auto formatting, and it works with WP 2.5. The generated layout also plays havoc with IE8, at least with my layout. Your mileage may vary.

The generated markup still isn't valid because of adding a stylesheet into the gallery within the page body, but with the changes I just detailed, at least it doesn't kill a kitten.

Though I will be using Drupal for portions of my site, I'm still debating whether to continue using Wordpress for purely weblog activities, such as at RealTech. I decided to download the Wordpress 2.5 release candidate 1, give it a run.

I've moved most of my XHTMLating work to plug-ins, so I didn't have the problems with overwriting source code. The plug-ins I do use worked without a hitch, including the one that XHTMLates comments (though the commenter's name field doesn't support internationalization at this moment).

I like the new dashboard, which does a good job of putting important information at the top. I don't like the fact that you still don't have a lot of options–or at least I can't see them–for eliminating all of the crud that gets pushed at you. I don't care about top plug-ins. I don't care about other WP weblogs of note.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

As for the new site design, I like the coloring, but I do not like all of the design changes. Case in point is the Write Post page, with post in process.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Look at all that wasted space. There are four headers above the Write Post page, and in the Write Post page, we now have to scroll down to control comments, pick categories, add tags. Yet what takes up the valuable real estate to the right? Related items, ie how to manage comments, posts, etc. When you're writing a post, what are the items you're most likely to edit for that post on a regular basis? I would say tags and categories, as well as comment status. You're not worried about managing categories or comments.

I do like that the Delete button is now more obvious, rather than buried at the bottom of the post. In addition, I was happy to see a link to draft entries rather than forcing us to filter on draft to find a post in process. There's also only one Save button for a post now, equivalent to the older "Save and Continue editing" function.

I also like the fact that you can edit the permalink, though the creators didn't go far enough–you should also be able to pick which category goes into the formal permalink. I had hoped that the developers would also list existing tags in the tag area, but you still have to guess what tags you have if you don't want to add new ones.

On the other hand, I do think the media management capabilities are superior in this version. If you serve video, you can now more easily manage your video, as well as music and image files. For instance, you can click on more than one file to upload, rather than have to upload individually. The application will then upload all the files, and for photos, attempt to use the photo's EXIF file to fill in the relevant information, though the application doesn't seem to like my photos' EXIF sections.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

However, if you're tempted to have Wordpress 2.5 create an in-page gallery, think again if you're serving your pages up as XHTML: the generated gallery HTML is not valid.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

This is a trivial error to fix, and I've sent the error information into the special feedback email address. However, this does demonstrate something I find a little disquieting–the Wordpress developers are not running their sites as XHTML, themselves, in order to ensure Wordpress provides both valid HTML and XHTML. Nor are the developers validating what they generate. If they did, they would realize that their sites don't validate.

Worse, the validation errors are such blatant errors that even relatively inexperienced web developers–and web designers–should have caught them early, and prevented their occurrence at this late stage of Wordpress 2.5 development. The only assumption I can make is that form is taking precedence over function with this release. Definitely not an attitude I would have expected considering the involvement in the development of Wordpress 2.5 by known standards luminaries.

The page containing the gallery does not open in Firefox, Safari, or Opera because these browsers read the page as XHTML, and the page has invalid markup. However, the page does open in IE8. Perhaps the underlying issue is that IE8 is the browser of choice for the WP development team.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

In the other sections, if you make any updates in the user page you have to type in your password again, or it tells you that you only entered it once. That's annoying. The rest of the pages seem the same, except for a new Media Library, which shows what images are used where. Handy if you want to track down in which posts a specific image has appeared.

Overall, the interface is cleaner and media file management has definitely improved, but the usability has, in my opinion, taken a couple of major hits. I include in this category the freedom to serve our pages up as valid XHTML without having to struggle with invalid generated page markup.

Now, I'll publish and see what happens to the feeds.

I've pulled the plug-in. It cleaned out the comment text, but not the name, URL, and email of the person. The email isn't an issue, as WP ensures the email is clean; the URL and the name, however, are still an issue. A new comment isn't the problem; edited comments are.

Frankly, if you're going to serve your pages up as XHTML, your best bet is to moderate comments so you can catch every variation of something that can go wrong. Either that, or get rid of comments, which is also an option.

I'll post a new version, once I've checked those fields, and completed a few other odds and ends.