March 13th, 2008

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.

Comments
1
Doug Alder - 2:41 pm March 13, 2008

http://burningbird.net/wp-validate-xhtml.tar.gz doesn't work _ i got your great 404 page - love it - gotta go to work on my error pages I guess :)

I'm getting leery of adding more plugins though - I put one in last night, thought it was working fine only to discover my server was down this morning - it did not play well with another plugin it appears and caused excessive resource usage. I had 460 warning emails from my server in my inbox this morning :D

2
Philip Taylor - 9:11 pm March 13, 2008

I suppose I've got to try this and see what happens :-)

3
Shelley - 9:12 pm March 13, 2008

Yup, you got me Philip.

4
Jacques Distler - 1:04 am March 14, 2008

The email address is a issue, too, if you have an interface where you (the blog owner) can view it and that interface is served as application/xhtml+xml

5
Shelley - 6:40 am March 14, 2008

That's a point, Jacques.

The real issue is that the comment editing is using a set of filters that Wordpress intends to be used via the Admin panel, and that's not necessarily a compatible usage. I seriously doubt you can have truly safe XHTML comments, and still have editing.

I'm not worried about mistakes, but the malicious introduction of characters intended to cause problems. And then being able to catch them when the comment is new AND post editing.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on cleaning out the name, email, and url fields, and then I'll have to figure out what I want to do, personally, at this site as regards editing.

It doesn't help that PHP has very little as regards reusable functionality to support XHTML. Python never looked so good.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.