Remote Sensing Tools

This morning, I went through and ran a mark-up validation check with the W3C services to make sure that my site was rendering properly. I generally do this at least once per month to ensure there isn’t anything I’m missing. I’m a major compliance freak when it comes to mark-up!

I fixed the video embedding errors that were plaguing the code, due to YouTube’s invalid mark-up issues (and others) — by installing a plug-in to filter the code to its compliant variant. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you chose to look at it — I do this with the compromise of the wmode parameter for transparency — but since I have a white background it’s not that much of a loss.

For the record, Google Videos and others continue to include invalid mark-up for embedding videos as well as including the wmode parameter.

Something crossed my mind to also check the Google Map that I had ‘embedded’ into the Google Maps Quicktag plug-in page. I had a hunch as to whether or not it would validate. Sure enough it didn’t, due to the code that was originally given by My Maps. In this case, the iframe wouldn’t validate, because the frameborder attribute was set to no instead of 0 or 1. I edited that quickly and re-validated — and all was right in the world once again.

Subsequently, I went back to Google Maps to see if anything had changed. If not, I was going to create a filter plug-in for WordPress to handle the invalid mark-up until the issue could be resolved. Sure enough — the newest ‘embed’ code uses the valid frameborder attribute setting! Sweet.

Also, I noticed that my external links in the info bubbles are now opening in the parent window! The only down-side, is that Internet Explorer 6 appears to be totally unresponsive and nothing occurs when clicking on an external link. Firefox works like a charm, however. I’d almost rather that IE hung like this anyway, until they straighten-out the bug — because I’d rather that users are forced to Shift + Click to open a new window than have it load into the iframe. But, it looks like the issue needs to be fixed for IE users at this time.

In conclusion, if you’ve been embedding any Maps using the Google Maps ‘embeddable’ code before these latest fixes — make sure the iframe’s frameborder attribute is set to 0 instead of no so that your site will validate.