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For those of you who have your own blog and include YouTube videos on it you will notice that YouTube decided to add a big, ugly YouTube search bar to the top of your embedded videos this morning. You’ll probably also notice that the embedded YouTube videos on my blog are sans ugly bar.

Here’s how you get rid of it:

&showsearch=0

Add that parameter to the end of the video URL when you are embedding it. Remember it shows up twice per embed.

If you are a standardista like myself, use &showsearch=0 instead.

Here’s some example code using YouTube’s default embed code:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Below is the standards compliant version, since we all know I haven’t just sailed on that ship, I’m the captain.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:344px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0" />
</object>

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks the new search bar is hella ugly.

I love WordPress because it is a free, easy to install, configure and use blog platform. It’s idiot-proof, especially if you’re using their free hosted service at WordPress.com. It is supported by an incredibly passionate community of people building plug-ins and themes to extend the scripts functionality and make it accessible to everyone.

I thought that WordPress was just about perfect until a few weeks ago when I was doing a routine XHTML validation of my site (yes I do it routinely). The site had errors. For a standardista like myself having the W3C validator tell you that you’ve got site errors is about as disconcerting as being told you have chlamydia.

I found two problems, the first stemmed from the relatively new Gallery feature’s use of inline style sheets. Inline style sheets can only be used within the document head. Use of them inside the body section causes the site to fail validation and an erection lasting longer than 24 hours.

Continue reading WordPress Is Not Perfect

One of the biggest complaints that I hear from designers who have moved from Transitional (sometimes even no doctype at all) to XHTML Strict or 1.1 is that the TARGET tag they’ve relied on for so long doesn’t validate anymore. And lets face it if you’re going through the effort of using standards compliant web site code, seeing that green validation cue is the equivalent of a nerdgasm.

Both the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations from the W3C have both eliminated TARGET completely. The justification is that it should be the user, not the web site, who decides whether or not a link opens in a new window, a new tab or the same window. I personally tend to agree. Forcing a new window to open essentially “breaks” the back button.

Luckily for TARGET diehards there is another way if you’re not enlightened enough to free yourself from the new-window shackles. The DOM 2.0 standard, which was published well after the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations, still includes the target attribute.

Continue reading New-Window TARGET Attribute Doesn’t Validate XHTML Strict

Just last week I made a post about how to properly embed YouTube videos so that they’d validate for those of us who use a strict XHTML doctype. I recently discovered commandN.tv through work and it’s become an instant favorite.. They use blip.tv to post their weekly podcast.

Disappointingly though I found that the code that blip offers for sharing doesn’t validate strict, so I wrote them an email asking why they didn’t and actually got a response fairly quickly back from a rep there going by the name of Angus. It was refreshing to not get a canned message back and the dude was helpful.

Continue reading Embedding Strict XHTML blip.tv Videos

The explosion of web sites that allow for the sharing of video is incredibly useful. Now absolutely everyone can watch my favorite BBQ sauce ad.

For those of us who would like to embed videos into our strict doctype web sites it’s a little more complicated though. YouTube doesn’t seem remotely interested in making the code they offer for embedding standards compliant, so if you insert it into your posts it won’t validate.

Continue reading Strict XHTML Embed Code For YouTube Videos

Your doctype is used to tell your browser how to interpret the code on the page. Perhaps the most useful reason is that it tells your browser whether to use quirks mode or standards mode.

Here’s an example of a valid XHTML 1.0 strict doctype declaration (my personal favourite):


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


When a browser loads a web site that includes a transitional doctype or no doctype at all it goes into quirks mode which supports deprecated tags elements like CENTER, FONT and IFRAME as well as deprecated attributes like ALIGN, WIDTH, HEIGHT, etc.

Continue reading Why Strict DOCTYPE is Important