I made some changes to the identica Badge script the other day. It started out just wanting to make it work in a XHTML DOM, but I ended up hacking it to produce valid XHTML and CSS as well as couple of other small changes. Honestly, I can't think of a good reason that the script needs to pass validation - the changes to ensure it's output is well-formed were necessary, but that's about it. Still, I did it anyway, and then I decided to write an article as a kind of walk-through of the modifications.

Why? No particular reason. Despite appearances perhaps, I'm not just desperate for content here :D In part it's because the web as a reference source currently relies on having mountains of (largely redundant) information to say the same things in different ways given a multitude of individual and specific contexts. And the reason I did this at all is simply that Open Source relies heavily on vested interests; I wanted to make it work on my pages, to make it output valid markup, and I wanted it to be fluid width.

So now I seem to have written a stupidly verbose change log for a largely pointless and unwanted set of changes, but nonetheless I would quite like it if my modified script could be adopted (i.e. hosted and maintained) "officially" as the default, and this seems as good a way as any to explain the things I changed and the reasoning, to plead that case.

The updated script is used here (left) and can be found at this location. I renamed it as identica-badge-xhtml.js to save confusion.