Hello guys, this is not causing any problem on my site but I’m terribly curious, when I ran my site on a xhtml validator it comes with this one error.

XML self-closing tag syntax used on <textarea>. The tag will not be closed.

This is where is pointing me:

<div id="whats-new-textarea">
<textarea name="whats-new" id="whats-new" /></textarea>
</div>

Would this code be ok, I haven’t change this so this is stock from BuddyPress.org. I’m just concern because of the security of my site, if you guys can clarify I will appreciate it very much.

Thanks,

LwEEs @ LwEEs.com

[@menel001 Participant 14 years, 7 months ago]

This is actually the raw code, the previous one it’s after displayed in a browser. It comes from /activity/post-form.php.

<div id="whats-new-textarea">
<textarea name="whats-new" id="whats-new" />@ </textarea>
</div>

Thanks again guys.

[@hnla Participant 14 years, 7 months ago]

Markup validation or malformed markup does not really correlate to lack of security.

Whereas WP strove to produce valid markup that would pass validation against DTD schemas there was always a fundamental flaw to maintaining that valid code which is third party coding i.e plugins, sadly when you allow third parties to introduce code/markup to the application you lose control over this aspect as plugin authors will have varying degrees of proficiency where frontend coding is concerned.

BP by and large – like WP – produces valid acceptable markup (we’ll overlook empty clearing divs ) however as one starts to add the vital and necessary plugins into the mix this valid code very rapidly falls apart. You can spend a lot of time if you so choose correcting these plugins, chasing down a heap of markup errors, but it will be a somewhat never ending task and not really that productive a use of someones time. Currently looking at our index page shows me 33 errors mainly produced by a video sidebar widget, most of these errors could be corrected, doing so in this instance largely a waste of time.

Interestingly /activity/ directory produces a fully compliant page, what page are you seeing your error on?