I have wasted some time trying to get mailman 2.1.18 archives and webpages to pass the W3C online validator (validator.w3.org) - a probably pointless exercise if 2.1 is not under active development.

However, there are a few pieces of low-hanging-fruit.

• in the mailto URLs in templates, the &In-Reply-To parameter should be escaped to become &In-Reply-To (a browser will unescape it before passing the URL to a mail client)

• <script> in template headers requires a content type, i.e. <script type="text/javascript">

• in the administration pages, HTML elements such as <table> are not allowed to be nested inside <address>. That's a bit harder to fix without changing the appearance of the pages, and most of those pages are not visible to the public anyway.

• in templates/*/admlogin.html and private.html, <td colspan=2 align=middle> should probably read <td colspan=2 align="center">

• templates/*/listinfo.html appears to have an empty <ul></ul> pair surrounding <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start> which the validator does not like. I suspect it's used to get an indent with no item marker.

• templates/*/private.html appears to have an empty <p> somewhere around line 40. I made the validator happy by inserting  .

Making HTML5-compliant archives seems just about possible, HTML5 admin pages rather less so without effort. The rel=made header that worked with, I think, Lynx and maybe Mosaic is now unrecognized and useless and should probably be dropped altogether.

-- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time)