3rd party invalid HTML

Amazon and Google.

[Karma]

On my site, I use both Amazon affiliate ads and Google search. My site uses HTML 4.01 Transitional and I'd like my whole site to validate but i'm not allowed to modify the 3rd party code.

Example errors:

<input type="hidden" name="domains" value="www.mydomain.tld"></input>

....end tag for element "INPUT" which is not open

http://rcm.amazon.tld/e/cm?t=#*$!#*$!xx&o=1&p=#*$!#*$!xx&asins=#*$!#*$!#*$!xx

....cannot generate system identifier for general entity "o" .

Am I using the wrong doc type? Do I even need to worry this much?

[edited by: Karma at 10:47 am (utc) on April 27, 2007]

[jtara]

Well, since you can't do anything about it, why worry about it?

It would be nice if there were a validation tool that can skip third-party code. Perhaps based on a list of partners, or perhaps using regular expressions. Is there?

[pageoneresults]

Hmmm, I've been able to get pages to validate using both of those mentioned.

With Amazon, I typically use an <iframe> to display those ads or I utilize this type of URI reference...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571245X/affiliateid

There are usually ways around some of that third party validation stuff. I've been fortunate to have been able to address most, if not all third party data merging in with mine.

Neither of those two errors should cause any problems. One has to do with a closing tag and the DOCTYPE you may be using (HTML Trans vs. XHTML). The other has to do with unescaped ampersands. This is probably the most common error reported with third party stuff. That and the JavaScript Language attribute which has been deprecated for years.