vBulletin LTS

[How-to] Make Your vB Template XHTML Validate Correctly

by Analogpoint 13 Sep 2007

Have you tried validating your vBulletin-powered site with the http://validator.w3.org? A standard vB installation will fail the validation with one error-- it's missing the xmlns attribute for html tag at the very beginning. You can check this by http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.vbulletin.com%2Fforum.

The <html> tag should look like <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

So until vB's default templates are changed to include the xmlns info, I needed a workaround, and I didn't want to manually edti dozens of templates.

In comes a brilliant feature that is implemented in the ACP. Expand the Styles & Templates section and click on Replacement Variable Manager.

Add a new Replacement Variable for each of your parent styles.

Search for text:

Code:

<html

Replace with text:

Code:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

This will add the xmlns attribute to the <html> tag and now your pages should validate as XHTML.

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html dir="ltr" lang="en">

Turns into

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en">

Happy Validating!

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