XHTMLating WordPress
Shelley Powers: Input from readers enters Wordpress in several different places in the code, most of which do not have hooks allowing us to override the code to provide our own. The only way Wordpress will be able to effectively do XHTML is through a commitment to make this a change in the underlying base code. Since the Wordpress developers have not shown any interest in supporting XHTML, and since I haven’t seen a lot of interest in XHTML support in Wordpress from my own explorations and published posts, this is just not a challenge I’ve been eager to take on.
If you submit a ticket with a patch which adds a hook that you need, I can help champion it. Furthermore, if you describe some observable behavior, I’ll automate a test case that I will continuously run to ensure that the feature continues to behave as desired. I’ve effectively been developing what amounts to veto power over changes which break things.