At last! I finally got around to creating my own blog. Being more than a little curious I decided to go with Drupal as opposed to WordPress. Though WordPress seems to be definitely more blog orientated and easier to use out of the box, Drupal strikes me as being somewhat more elegant and with much more potential.

Having been involved with and built several websites based upon WordPress recently I can confirm that it is a very easy platform to use. There are a few things with it that can be a little annoying though.

The way it handles the the paragraph markup within the internal editor makes validating your code to W3C standards slightly challenging as the initial markup is not displayed in the editor. I ended up resorting to editing the internal PHP code somewhere deep internally to switch it off completely

If you want valid XHTML code the plugins can be a bit pot luck. Some of them are really excellent and others are just far too much effort to work through fixing the code to ensure the pages actually validate.

After spending a lot of time fixing errors in the code I had managed to track one last error related to the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin that was related to an Attribute that would not validate. This particular error: Attribute “aria-required” is not a valid attribute was related to access and is actually a legitimate item. More details can be found directly on the blog post now offline "Validating, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, W3C & the SI Captcha Gotcha". Sadly that blog post has gone 404 walkabout. Unfortunately the installation of a couple of plugins since I combed through all the code and fixed the errors has introduced a few score more. Like I said it is pot luck with WordPress plugins being written with standards compliant code.