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Comment by danielha | Hacker News Reader

I did see all 3 tweets you sent about this, but I didn't get a chance to respond yet.

  >> Parse errors that make me wonder how anyone's actually using it with a stock PHP install

There was one line that would result in a parse error if your server does not have shorthand support enabled. Syntactically correct, but compatibility oversight. It was fixed a while ago and will be included in the next release tonight.

  >> not to mention very broken markup.

What's broken about the markup?

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Ah, ok, fixing the <? was pretty easy, then. Thanks for the fast response.

My complaints about the markup:

1. img tags without alt, which is invalid HTML, and an accessibility problem. Further, some of these are "fake" links, in that they have inline styles to make them appear like links, and inline onclick actions, but are not wrapped in anchors, or given tabindex=0 to make them focusable. You actually can't activate them without using a mouse.

2. css included in the <body>, which causes an unsightly reflow, and is not valid html or xhtml. Wordpress provides an event that triggers at the closing </head> tag, I believe.

3. despite the included css, and an id on almost everything, several elements have inline style attributes. Why is this necessary?

4. An empty inline script tag? What's that all about?

Is it really necessary to require javascript to even view comments properly? It seems like there's a lot of anchors with href="#" that could have reasonable fallback URLs given the data in $dsq_response. Heck, even the form could post to a disqus.com url, so you could comment without JS.

Also, like I said, I do really like where you guys are coming from. Seems like you've got the right idea.

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