Are bulletin boards intrinsically not xhtml compliant?
 

Even though all my vb3 templates are xhtml compliant, when I validate threads, the validator will inevitably give me a "Not compliant" result.

And the reason for this is, that users who post on the forums tend to use non-SGML characters like the euro sign(?), or Quotes like this: ?, ?, ?.

And since they can use vbCode, they often write code like:Since a bulletin board must have some part of its pages entered by users, and you cant expect all the users to write correct well nested tags.. my pages are always non xhtml compliant.

Is there a solution to this?
Or due to the very nature of a bulletin board (contribution of user-written content), can it never be xhtml compliant?

it can never be compliant unless you want to go mad with the resources of your server and check every message being inputted into teh database replacing all non xhtml compliancy with compliancy i.e

find: "
replace with: &quote;

as you can see this is where XHTML becomes stupid, and thus imo xhtml compliancy is heavily overrated.

For forums, I think xhtml compliance seems unnecessary.. due to such issues.

But I do make all my personal pages xhtml compliant.

Well you could strip all non-alphanumeric characters from the posting text except the brackets for bbcode and the = sign.

It's hardly difficult. Most of my forum pages are XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant and vBulletin itself is too, I believe. You just have to have standards in mind when developing. " to " and such has been around far longer than XHTML.

Filburt, I'm talking about user inputted data. I cant tell my users to type """ when they want to have quotes.

But you are running on a vB powered server, this give your certain advantages (like PHP, and some excellent functions built into vB) over plain vanilla text input: you can post-process the content to modify standalone " and replace them with " etc... if you need to...

Probably I can handle non-SGML characters that way. How do I take care of users using tags in the wrong order?