Or is this something to do with the design switch (ie cache issue) and they’ll move it later?

Dave: Yeah, very interesting about the inline CSS. I didn’t notice that. I think you might be right about the caching issue, but the smart thing to do in that case is to just name the CSS file with a date format, like “css_2004_07_06.css”. I’m going to send them an e-mail right now about it.

They could also benefit from the Mike Industries typeface selector. I’ll go ahead and send that their way as well. In the past, they’ve been pretty good about listening and responding to suggestions.

I probably shouldn’t get annoyed by that, but I see it so much anymore. And if one wants to use XHTML, they really should at least make it well formed even if they don’t make it validate. If one doesn’t want to make it validate or well formed, then why do they even attempt trying to pass it off as something it’s clearly not? I just don’t get that.

When I see a page like this, I lose faith in the company/service/etc (unless I’m already very familiar with them and trust them). I feel like they either don’t have a clue what they’re doing or they’re trying to trick me. I realize that’s probably extremist or something, but that’s how it comes across to me deep down (and I know a thing or two about coding and how easy it is). If they just slapped an HTML 4.01 DTD on that page (thus limiting the errors to only 20), I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and not think so badly of them. But 131 errors? They really don’t have a clue what they’re coding.

1. It doesn’t look to me like the Bloglines team is done with things. The fact that they’ve already added back the font size selector today and that there is still so much inline CSS (hopefully) tells me this is still “in testing”. The reason I bring this up is that it’s possible they are converting their code over to XHTML and just jumped the gun on the DOCTYPE. But yes, I agree, it doesn’t appear they’ve made much effort yet on writing valid XHTML. Strange too… Bloglines seems like kind of an easy site to manage from a coding standpoint. There’s no 3rd party code and the feeds themselves are valid.

2. Bloglines makes heavy use of javascript and the XmlHttpObject when passing data around, so some of these errors could be the results of document.writes and other such methods. Yes, everything can be made valid, but this just complicates the transition a bit.

So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how quickly Bloglines addresses this stuff. If it stays as is, then yes, I agree, using that DOCTYPE is a bit worthless.