Symphony.

There are a couple sites that I am converting into Symphony as part of learning.

My idea was just to take the existing semantic markup and then make templates etc. I am finding out that, if that code has elements like nbsp; <br> tags, unclosed tags, Symphony will not parse anything?

You are right. Symphony uses an XSLT parser – all of those parsers need valid XML/XHTML as input.

I was trying some pretty popular sites out there

http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/

and

http://www.epicurious.com/

I think alot of the use of non valid xhtml is to accomplish certain things with Ajax, etc.

AFAIK this is not related to Ajax, but to “code style”.

:-)

Many people think that their code is OK as long as “it works” in some specified browsers…

yea, thats Kinda what I was getting at. Alot of code doesn’t validate, but as long as it works on the front end.

I was planning on redoing http://www.epicurious.com/

and it has about 400 errors! ARGH.

Error counts may be wrong, because it’s hard for a machine to count them properly. So if you fix one, you may get rid of ten errors.

Still 40 to fix…

Michael is right. I once had a page that had a few hundred errors.It began with a missing “>”. I added it in and most of them were suddenly gone. Sometimes one error can send off a series of others.

Also, invalid CSS has no effect on Symphony so if you’re counting those errors as well you’re already a large step ahead.

Besides, if you fix it on one templated page you fix it on all templated pages. I’ve had the dicussion before with clients who say, “We’re missing something but it’s missing on every page! I know it’ll take a long time but can you fix it?” “Sure, just give me a minute… Done. Anything else?” “What… You fixed every single page!?” “Yep. I’m a ninja.” “Developer-sama!”

yea, very true!

As I start going through the code, most of the errors were use of NBSP (which I think were used for menu stylings); lots of unclosed tags and a couple of other things. My idea was just do recreate a site that I like, but spending all this time cleaning something up that might end up breaking it in the first place just seems stupid.

I brought the code into CODA and it has an internal validator that you can go and work through etc. My idea was just to have a site that was somewhat complicated to work with in Symphony. I might have redo the code :( i’d rather have spend the time in Symphony.

Heh, I found that I have never thought to look into trekbikes.com source code, because all my attention were focused on their bikes entirely.

Yea, its pretty sweet, I love how they organize the content, and the subsections, really smart!