Thread: Be great if you fixed all your themes to validate

Be great if you fixed all your themes to validate

Some of my clients have applications which lend themselves well to your themes.

First thing I always do vetting themes is run them through the http://validator.w3.org to see if the HTML is valid.

Several of your themes are throwing ugly errors that will interfere with likely interfere with SEO + just shouldn't exist in premium themes.

Let me know if there are any plans to fix the broken HTML in your themes.

Thanks!

If you can please advise specifically which themes you have concerns with I can check our internal ticketing system for mention of reported issues/fixes. Thanks.

Here's an example... taskerr is using deprecated/obsolete HTML, which will likely be a negative SEO ranking signal. Also heading flow is broken (syntax invalid), likely because of this too...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0

Pages should validate like this...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=da...Inline&group=0

With two warnings.

1) one for using HTML5 (best SEO signal)

2) one for passing charset via Apache instead of at document level, which is required to speed up IE rendering

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Vantage is even worse, with 40 errors + 18 warnings...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdemos.appthemes.com%2Fvanta ge&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inli ne&group=0

Because your themes use <hgroup> (deprecated) instead of <header> is part of the reason.

Another problem is your themes break semantic structure, meaning tags placed which break the the HTML spec...

Like <div> tags inside <hgroup> which is incorrect syntax.

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Jobroller is 19 errors + 10 warnings...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdemos.appthemes.com%2Fjobro ller%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype =Inline&group=0

In short, probably best to add an item to your release process to run all parent themes + child themes + plugins (that generate HTML) through the W3C validator to ensure clean code before release.

Also best to turn on full WP debug + ensure there are no WP errors... by adding this to your wp-config.php file...

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
@ini_set('display_errors', 0);

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These are all things that smart clients look at when vetting code to run on high traffic sites.

Thanks, I'll seek further information and will respond asap.

There are no plans at this stage to make any changes as the themes aren't considered in need of fixing. There are some references Here, here and here which may help explain our teams stance on this a bit further. Thanks.

A ridiculous answer.

Any marginally competent coder can produce clean HTML in their themes + plugins.

I've clarified this further with our developers and understand that each theme will be reviewed and fixed accordingly, sorry for any misunderstanding. Thanks.