Validity errors

Having your site validate is nice, but in general if everything is working perfectly (as it appears to be for you) then I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

last I checked, www.remarpro.com does not validate

I appear to have given the wrong URL for the validator’s error list of my site. Here’s the correct one:

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcatholica.pontifications.net%2F

The post titled “Ten thousand scandals do not make one doubt” is the problem. The reason it’s complaining there is twofold.

First, you have incorrect nesting around the blockquote area. You have tags like this:
<p><blockquote>
</p></blockquote>
See the bad nesting?

The other complaint is that p is not allowed to contain block elements, like blockquote. P can only contain inline elements.

Block level tags create a “block” of text. Blocks get newlines around them automatically, for one thing. What other elements blocks can contain depends on the type of block. Both p and blockquote are block elements, but p is like a “final” block element.

In other words, a blockquote can contain both other blocks and inline elements. A p, on the other hand, can only contain inline elements.

So to do a blockquote correctly, it should be like this:
<blockquote><p>
Your text
</p></blockquote>

But the text of my article doesn’t contain the < p > tag at any point–at least I didn’t add it and I can’t see it when I edit the article.

The test of your article, was it typed up in a word editing software then uploaded to the blog to be published?

I find that copying from Word and pasting it into WordPress will invalidate the html.

As for validating the blog, it ought to be done by people who have a bit of html knowledge. Out of the box, WordPress is spot on, it is the user that invalidates the code

As for errors on WordPress, it is a massive website with tens of thousands of pages. The Wc3 website also invalidates on some pages if you look.

There is no way we can expect the average user of WordPress to validate the html and css, but if you build a website using WordPress as the engine and have an important website, you have to make the effort to win the nice little Css and Xhtml validated logo.

The only two real ways to mess up a WP blog is widgets and like I said, copying stuff from Word and so on, which keeps the formatting only Microsoft could manage, with each sentance marked up with html.

“But the text of my article doesn’t contain the < p > tag at any point–at least I didn’t add it and I can’t see it when I edit the article.”

Sure you can. That would be the places where you hit enter. The p tag is a paragraph marker. A < p > and < /p > surrounds every paragraph you write.

If you’re using the WordPress prettyifed editor thingy, then there should be a button labelled HTML in the upper right. Click that to see the actual HTML of your post, with p’s and q’s and all. Edit that to be correct instead of trying to correct such things in the visual editor.

The visual editor is fine for typing stuff in initially, but for later editing, it kinda blows.

I must be a real dolt. I’m afraid I do not a button labelled HTML in the upper right.

I am looking at the article in question right now in the WordPress editor (“Write Post”). Here are the first paragraphs of the article, ending with the paragraph that contains the first < blockquote > tag:

<b>by Alvin Kimel</b>

Rod Dreher’s recent announcement that he is seriously considering leaving Catholicism and entering into the communion of the Orthodox Church is receiving great attention in the blogosphere. Michael Liccione observes that Dreher is giving voice to what a number of Catholics and non-Catholics think: “If the Catholic Church is who and what she says she is, then why is she so messed up?” He concludes that lack of holiness is the single “most effective argument <i>against</i> the truth of the Catholic faith.”

I have to register my partial disagreement with Michael. In my judgment the existence of suffering is the single most powerful argument against the truth of the Catholic faith. It is suffering that tempts me to disbelief, not the scandals of the Church. If God the Holy Trinity truly exists, then how can there be so much terrible suffering and destruction in the world? Where is God? How can he permit it? Can the gospel be true when the good and loving creator of the universe allows the slaughter of tens of thousands in Rwanda and the Sudan?

Somehow those of us who believe find that we still believe, must believe, despite the horrific reality of suffering and destruction in God’s good universe.

But what about the evil that is present in the Church, committed by the Church? Does not this evil witness equally against the truth of the gospel? Perhaps. I can understand someone refusing to believe the truth of the Christian faith because of the unholiness of Christians. The Christian faith makes remarkable claims about Christian life. Christians are supposed to be a people who have died and risen with Christ and are reborn in the Spirit. They are supposed to be a people who have been given a new heart for God and who delight in obeying his will. They are supposed to be ontologically different. How then is it possible that Christians are so often as morally compromised as their secular neighbors? This is a true scandal to the world and an obstacle to faith. Yet we who believe find that we still believe, must believe, despite the sinfulness of our fellow Christians and despite our own personal sinfulness and moral failures.

Who of us have not betrayed our faith and brought scandal upon the Church of Jesus Christ? Who of us will not stand before the Holy God at the Great Assize with blood on our hands? Who of us are not guilty of driving away neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and family from the Church and the faith of Christ? We rightly expect the clerics of the Church to exhibit exemplary holiness and fidelity; but are we truly surprised, should we be surprised, when we find that these men are as weak and iniquitous as we ourselves? As Johann Adam Möhler observed, the Church’s priests and bishops do not fall from the skies: “she must take them out of the description of men that the age can furnish.”

I do not intend by these comments to minimize the evil and criminality of those priests who have sexually abused boys and girls entrusted to their care and of the bishops who protected and enabled them. Moral outrage, protest, and reform of the Church is the only proper response to these crimes.

I do not deny that a believer might lose his faith in light of these crimes. Faith is a mystery, as is the loss of faith. But the wise counsel of St Francis de Sales is surely appropriate here:

Those who commit scandals are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder by destroying other people’s faith in God by their terrible example…. But I’m here among you to prevent something far worse for you. While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder, those who take scandal—who allow scandals to destroy their faith—are guilty of spiritual suicide!

Rightly did Dorothy L. Sayers state that the eternal Son of God has endured three great humiliations in his rescue of humanity: the Incarnation, the Cross, <i>and the Church</i>.

Here is the validation errors page for this article:
https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcatholica.pontifications.net%2F%3Fp%3D1659&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline

Does anyone see anything here that would be causing the validation errors, or should I simply ignore them at this point?

Thanks!

I must be a real dolt. I’m afraid I do not a button labelled HTML in the upper right.

It sounds like you turned off the rich text editor thingy. Turn it back on to see the HTML button and to be able to actually edit your post. Without the rich editor, you don’t get nearly as much control over how the post looks.

Or just ignore the validation errors.

From the first post in the thread:

“Greetings. I am using WP 1.5. “

No rich text editor or HTML button in 1.5