[volunteers] (forw) [web-team] Catching up (site maintenance)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> You can catch the HTML syntax stuff with weblint.
> 
> $ sudo apt-get install weblint
> $ weblint --only --structure http://svlug.org/
> http://svlug.org/ (241:1) <font> at (229:1) is never closed
> http://svlug.org/ (258:1) <ul> at (250:1) is never closed
> http://svlug.org/ (267:1) </ul> with no opening <ul>
> http://svlug.org/ (271:1) <font> at (244:1) is never closed

That would be more useful if the pages were flat HTML, rather than being
constructed from a series of PHP includes.  As it is, claiming something
occurs on line 244 of the front page -- measuring lines by the HTML
served by the httpd, tells me almost nothing about the source.

The front page is a particularly problematic example, since it's the
most modular of all the pages.  However, I can at least do "lynx -source
http://www.svlug.org/ > /tmp/index.html and call up the resulting
raw-HTML dump into vim (with "set nu"), to see what the heck weblint is
talking about.

In fact, the <font> at line 229 of the dumped equivalent-raw-HTML file
is _not_ "never closed".  It is closed further down.  weblint presumably
just doesn't like nesting of <font> tags in structures like these:

  <font face="arial,helvetica,serifa" size=-1>    
  <font size=+1>Latest News from <b><a href="http://www.freshmeat.net/">Freshmeat</a></b></font>

I don't like it much, either, but I didn't write this stuff; I just
maintain and occasionally repair it.  (To illustrate the modularity
problem, my recollection is that, of the two lines above, one is from
the top-level index.php file, and the second is from an invocation of
the WebFetch CGI.)

The claim about the <ul> tags is also not correct.  That tag does indeed
get closed.