vBSEO produces invalid HTML

**KirbyDE** · 03-19-2008 07:51 AM

Without vBSEO

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="de">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
    <title>vBSEO Bug Test</title>
</head>
<body>
    <!--<a href="member.php?u=7329">*Dä*</a>-->
</body>
</html>

With vBSEO

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="de">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
    <title>vBSEO Bug Test</title>
</head>
<body>
    <!--<a href="members/7329--dae-.html">*Dä*</a>-->
</body>
</html>

This is invalid according to W3C Validator, also Firefox does not display it correctly.

**Keith Cohen** · 03-19-2008 09:54 AM

What is not displaying correctly? The only content is inside HTML comments as far as I can tell, so you should just get a blank page, right? Also, what is the error that the W3C Validator shows you for that snippet of code?

**briansol** · 03-19-2008 12:52 PM

I think its an html problem on the double dash.

7329--

that double dash is causing the browser to look for the closing comment.

The real fix here, is if you allow more than [a-z0-9 \s], then you should only use the members/userID/ rewrite style.

**Keith Cohen** · 03-19-2008 12:55 PM

You would think the browser would look for -->. Anything inside of  should be considered a comment and not rendered or validated anyway IMO.

But yes, that probably isn't the best URL format to use when you have usernames with special characters.

**briansol** · 03-19-2008 12:59 PM

HTML is derrived from SGML. This problem existed way back when on that full set too.

read this:
HTML and SGML comments

**KirbyDE** · 03-21-2008 12:45 PM

Validator output

Code:

# Line 8, Column 31: invalid comment declaration: found name start character outside comment but inside comment declaration.

    <!--<a href="members/7329--dae-.html">*Dä*</a>-->

# Info Line 8, Column 4: comment declaration started here.

    <!--<a href="members/7329--dae-.html">*Dä*</a>-->

# Error Line 8, Column 49: end tag for element "a" which is not open.

    <!--<a href="members/7329--dae-.html">*Dä*</a>-->


The Validator found an end tag for the above element, but that element is not currently open. This is often caused by a leftover end tag from an element that was removed during editing, or by an implicitly closed element (if you have an error related to an element being used where it is not allowed, this is almost certainly the case). In the latter case this error will disappear as soon as you fix the original problem.

If this error occurred in a script section of your document, you should probably read this FAQ entry.
# Error Line 8, Column 29: XML Parsing Error: Comment not terminated .

    <!--<a href="members/7329--dae-.html">*Dä*</a>-->

Firefox 2 visible output

Code:

*Dä*-->

It dosnt't matter if the URL format is good or not. Fact is that vBSEO produces invalid HTML which leads to corrupted output so this needs to be fixed ASAP.

**Keith Cohen** · 03-21-2008 01:19 PM

Change you user profile URL format, and it will be corrected.

Originally Posted by briansol

The real fix here, is if you allow more than [a-z0-9 \s], then you should only use the members/userID/ rewrite style.

**KirbyDE** · 03-21-2008 01:53 PM

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

Change you user profile URL format, and it will be corrected.

You suggest to change all existing URLs?

Obviously this is not an option as it would make all indexed URLs invalid - a nightmare if this happens on Thread URLs.

As a workaround, I'm going to remove the comment - but this is not a real fix either.

Is this bug limited to profile URLs?

**briansol** · 03-21-2008 06:20 PM

the 'bug' isn't a big at all. It's a limitation of HTML comments, as stated above.

Use <?php //comments; ?> instead

There's ZERO good reason to use HTML comments now a days.

**KirbyDE** · 03-25-2008 02:55 PM

I am certainly not willing to manually modify the templates on every forum I admin (the comment is a stock vBulletin comment!) just to get around this issue.

Fact is that without vBSEO everything is fine. But with vBSEO, the HTML does not validate any longer and produces visible output corruption (at least in Firefox).

So this is a bug in vBSEO!

There's ZERO good reason to use HTML comments now a days.

That's your opinion, and certainly not true.

How would you insert AdSense section targeting using PHP comments for example?

**Keith Cohen** · 03-25-2008 03:00 PM

That is a default vBulletin HTML comment? Never noticed that before. Makes no sense why it would be there anyway.

Originally Posted by KirbyDE

So this is a bug in vBSEO!

If anything, it is only a bug in the sense that based on the fact that you allow special characters in user names, then you will need to modify the URL format to correct the issue.

**KirbyDE** · 03-25-2008 03:08 PM

It was (at least up til 3.7 RC 1).

Template pm_messagelistbit_user.

I havn't tried with thread titles, but I think it could happen there as well - and disallowing umlauts for thread titles or changing the url format with several tenthousand threads indexed is certainly not an option.

Therefore I insist that this is a bug that needs to be fixed.

**briansol** · 03-25-2008 03:45 PM

I don't think there's an html comment with the thread in it anywhere, is there? I haven't seen it. so i don't think this will ever effect threads.

At the end of the day, it's not a bug, but rather a limitation.

You could set up to use |'s instead of -'s for replacement, but then you might run into a logical OR (||) somewhere...

So, I re-iterate what I originally stated. If you allow special characters, you shouldn't use them as part of the URL, and use the ID instead.

You can change just the member's re-write which won't effect your indexed thread counts at all.

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