I have switched from the native java scriptlet as provided by Flickr’s “badge” and implemented Dave Kellam’s flickrRSS plugin, as suggested by matthew.
The xhtml invalid count has dropped considerably down to a handful, surrounding the lack of correct encoding of the & character. By default xhtml compliant code must ‘encode’ the & symbol as `&`.
This is less a problem with the plugin, and more a general problem with flickr URI formatting semantics. Why flickr chose to use an & rather than something like ? or ! which do not cause URI encoding issues I’ll never now.
On the bright side, the plugin does cache thumbnails of each image, which helps improve performance and cuts down on multiple hits to the RSS feed every time the same browser returns to the page.
Update: the above plugin is very cool. Works well and doesn’t spit out any unnecessary code (and is compliant which rocks).
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of code, design.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Apr 24th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Thanks for using the plugin. The code should validate, I think you just need to encode the ampersands in he link to your flickr rss feed.
They probably went with the ampersand because it looks prettier in urls than ?s or !s.
Apr 24th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
Yes, I’ve tried encoding the ampersands in general, as well as your plugin (and the flickr badge) however it still renders as `&` on browser load, which = bad as far as the xhtml validator is concerned.
It’s a tricky problem to fix as the URL’s appear to get constructed during page load, rather than prior to or on, which makes it very difficult to encode an ampersand (as it’s yet to exist at that point).
Yes, ‘&’ is often used in URI construction, however some browsers have major problems with an unencoded ampersand which can lead to malformed URLs..
Apr 25th, 2005 at 9:10 am
From the validation results:
That appears to just be the your link to the rss feed, the plugin doesn’t generate that code. I didn’t encode the ampersands that are used to fetch the RSS feed but that shouldn’t matter because it’s php stuff that occurs in the background.
Apr 25th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Fixed. Looks like I missed an ampersand. Nice spotting. :)