plaintxt.org

Recently I deleted every post I had on this blog. Why? Because I learned that everything I knew about writing mark-up for my blog was wrong. Not really wrong, actually, but just uninformed. I realized this after reading a terrific article:

There are far too many bloggers and writers that don’t know a thing about writing for the web, technically speaking. Not knowing how-to is not an excuse when you take up a writing hobby or professional writing on the web.

For example, I was using the <em> tag when I wanted italicized text. Wrong. I thought I knew HTML, which I did for practical purposes, but I didn’t know how to use correctly. Then I read the article Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure.

So I started over. I used <cite> when I was citing another blog. I started using <em> when I wanted emphasis (shocking!) and <strong> when I wanted yet more (stronger?) emphasis. And I started using blockquotes for actual quotations, not for indenting text.

Then I saw that Kunte wrote a plugin for WordPress that extracted the cite="" and title="" attributes from <blockquote> tags. Look at the blockquote above. Basically it’s taking the attributes of the blockquote to make a proper attribution: lovely, semantic mark-up.

I saw one place from improvement. For the citation below the blockquote text, the plugin wrapped the citation in <div class="source></div>. I thought that this might be more appropriately tagged with <cite>.

Have a look at the source code for the blockquote above and you’ll see what I mean. I’m using the revised plugin here and waiting to hear back from Kunte to work out how the plugin might be released. Interested?

I am also considering trying to make plugin for for the quicktags of the WordPress post editor. I don’t use the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress, and about half of my support time for my themes is given to help inexperienced bloggers remove destructive mark-up added by the WYSIWYG editor.

It’s a fantastic example of how not knowing how to write for the Web can hurt your blog.

Anyhow, I added some HTML tags and revised others in the quicktags.js file. Below is a screenshot of how my revised quicktags file works in my post editor screen:

I may try this quicktags.js file as a plugin, but until then it’s just here as an example of how—with a little knowledge and a few tools—our blogs can be better and more useful.

A Plugin?

Though I am still waiting to hear back from Kunte, I thought I might as well make this “informally” available. You can download my revision to Kunte’s plugin below.

Semantic Blockquotes v0.1 (4kb) for WordPress 2.0+

Please be aware that it is currently license-less and support-less until I figure out what exactly I should do with this—if anything. Where is an Emiy Post v2.0 when you need one?

Kunte was nice enough to scorn my thoughts on his post, Blockquotes in feed.

I suppose I stepped on his toes, so I should apologize for that. I tried to express just that in the emails I sent him, which I failed to do. Lesson learned: keep your shit to yourself.