Blog formatting woes

It's probably just me, but I have this quirk of making my web pages validate.

When it comes to Blogger, it does, in a way. Before the cool Blogger bar (see above), they had that butt-ugly table banner. Well now, the table layout is okay, I guess, but whenever I try to validate my blog, that darn thing spoils everything. I even emailed Blogger support about this, but they replied that since it doesn't break any functionality in Blogger, it's their least of their priorities. Oh well. I'd like to think that the top bar was their reply to my complaint. Right, dream on.

And now that I've got two other ways to blog (Email-to-Blogger and BloGTK), my formatting problems have gone worse.

For the email functionality, my MUA (Thunderbird) breaks up text into whatever column width I specified. That means Blogger treats each line break as a prompt to insert <br /> tags. And, consequently, it looks just plain ugly when rendered on the web.

Same thing with BloGTK. It doesn't have the provision for the post title so I had to manually add a custom tag for <h3 class="post-title">. Thing is, BloGTK adds a <p /> tag at the beginning of each new non-empty line so the header (post title) gets an extra paragraph spacing before it, resulting in too much white space on the page.

My only solution is to turn off the "smart" linebreaks feature in Blogger, manually add paragraph tags (in the email; BloGTK does it for me), and, in BloGTK, write the first paragraph immediately after the ending tag on the post title. The source code doesn't look nice, but at least the rendered page becomes bearable to look at.