Markup Disobedience
By Adrian Sutton
I’ve been fiddling with my blog again. I’ve enabled a couple of plugins – one to allow comment preview and one to add OpenID authentication when commenting. OpenID authenticated comments skip the moderation step. All working quite nicely – the OpenID plugin even lets me run my own OpenID server instead of using Verisign.
The problem is, to set up the OpenID server, the plugin adds two meta tags to each page:
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://www.symphonious.net/?xrds" /> <meta http-equiv="X-Yadis-Location" content="http://www.symphonious.net/?xrds" />
HTML 5 considers that invalid because only officially blessed values can be used in http-equiv, even if the process of blessing them is just adding them to a wiki. I guess the wiki is considered a way to flexibly extend the spec without actually supporting proper ad-hoc extensions.
Given that I quite like the idea of supporting ad-hoc extensions and I think the idea of a wiki page being part of a spec is patently ridiculous, I’m not going to bother changing the extension around to use a different for of specifying the OpenID server.
I know, I’m such a rebel…