On the SmartyCode.com site, there was a new article posted recently looking at making the output of your Zend Framework application XHTML compliant.

Serving XHTML is often misunderstood by php developers. Frontend engineers simply include the XHTML doctype to their documents, without actually serving document as XHTML. This triggers majority of the browsers to treat such pages as 'tag-soup'. [...] This front controller plugin's code mostly takes concepts from the excellent article by Keystone Websites, but implements in Zend Framework environment in an object-oriented way.

The code works as a plugin to the controller and runs a few checks on the contents of the data being pushed out (dispatchLoopShutdown) and returns the correct header information (DOCTYPE, language attribute) in the correct XHTML format for the data. When the plugin is registered, all it takes is a call to the "doctype()" method to output the correct information.

Rob Allen has posted a quick tip of how to use the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework to correctly render XHTML compliant output.

When you render a Zend_Form, the elements will render to HTML compliance rather than XHTML compliance, even if you have < ?php echo $this->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');?> at the top of your layout script. Practically, this means that all the input elements do not end in "/>". To resolve this, you need to call the doctype() view helper prior to rendering your form.

He includes an example of the doctype call (on a view object) to tell the script to output in the "XHTML1_TRANSITIONAL" format.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a series they've worked up to show bloggers out there running WordPress how to create a custom theme from scratch:

In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Here's the list so far:

• Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
• Part 2 - splitting it up to make the layout parts
• Part 3 - converting the Photoshop template to XHTML
• Part 4 - cleaning up the XHTML and doing some styling with CSS
• Part 5 - how to preload some images with Javascript to make the page load faster
• Part 6 - creating the WordPress-specific markup
• Part 7 - working up the PHP functionality
• Part 8 - integrating PHP into the template
• Part 9 - marking up the "framework" of the site (header/footer/sidebar)
• Part 10 - adding additional files like a links page and changing the posting template
• Part 11 (?) - deploying the theme out to the public view

Nick Halstead has posted two more programming tips in his series - this time they cover "non-coding" and "XHTML analytics:

The first, tip #7, was written up by Jonathan Holland. He talks about a method of using metrics software that works correctly with XHTML syntax. His example script basically does a dynamic add to the page when it's loaded to put the script tag in after the validation has taken place.

The next tip, #8 (written by Dordea Cosmin), looks at "non coding" types of things you can do to help work towards success in your company. These sorts of things include diplomacy, being friendly, and continuing education.

Derick Rethans has pointed out a "gotcha" that was passed along to him (somewhat incorrectly) about the "name" attribute being deprecated in XHTML 1.0.

Just now somebody on IRC was claiming that the "name" attribute in HTML - the one that is used to give form input fields a name to be used in $_GET and _$POST in PHP is in fact deprecated. [...] But if you read correctly, it's only for the elements: a, applet, form, frame, iframe, img, and map.

For the official information, check out the section of the new spec dealing with this transition.

PHPBuilder.com has a review posted today of a piece of PHP development software - RapidPHP 2007:

Of the many editors available for creating (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP pages, several combine a few different yet compatible languages. Some include support and a few manage to make it work seamlessly. RapidPHP 2007 belongs in the latter category.

They walk through the list of features (including a PHP syntax checker) and include a screenshot of the PHP function hints in action. The reviewer also talks about the support for other languages it has - the (X)HTML editor and CSS style sheet editor.

Paul Jones talks about an aspect of the Solar framework (Solar_App_Bookmarks) and its inclusion in the Stenhouse CSS Framework:

Solar comes with a reference application, Solar_App_Bookmarks. As I outlined in an earlier post about views and layouts in Solar, the bookmarks application is extended from Solar_App_Base. The Base package holds all the layouts, and those layouts are what I want to talk about in this entry. Solar_App_Base comes packaged with the Stenhouse CSS Framework.

Paul briefly introduces the framework and includes example code - an XHTML scaffold, main layout files and some layout partials to show the framework in use.

In this new tutorial from DevShed, they demonstrate the use of a handy little bit of functionality to help keep your code (and markup) clean - Tidy.

Now that you know that the Tidy (X)HTML formatting/correcting application can be called directly from your own PHP 5 scripts, over the course of this series, which is comprised of three friendly tutorials, I'm going to walk you through using the bunch of useful functions included with this library.

This tutorial (part one) talks about the parsing of (X)HTML strings and using the tidy_clear_repair, tidy_parse_file and tidy_repair_file functions to handle the cleanup of (X)HTML strings and files automatically.

Ed Finkler has an announcement about the latest release of the PHP security audit tool, PHPSecInfo, for version 0.2.1 today.

PhpSecInfo v0.2.1 is now available. It's primarily a bugfix release, but a fairly significant one.

Updates include:

• uid and gid tests now correctly test the user and group that PHP is executing as
• Changed upload_max_filesize and post_max_size return '�OK'� if current value is equal to recommended value
• fixed nonstandard naming on some constants
• fixed XHTML validation issue

Felix Geisendorfer has a "quick hit" tip posted to his blog today on using HTML 4.0.1 in your CakePHP 1.2 installation.

This is just a little tip for those of you who dislike their xhtml to end up as tag soup and still prefer to send out Html 4.01 strict. Here is how to make all helper functions in Cake 1.2 output Html 4.01 compliant markup instead of xhtml.

The helper he's created just loops through the entire $tags array and does a replace on the greater-than sign to add a slash to make it compliant.