Wordpress 2.6 was officially released today. There are a ton of new additions, bug fixes and other coolnesses within this release so you might want to get a hold of the newest version and update your Wordpress.
I already updated in case you were wondering. 
EDIT | Apparently there have been some folks having issues with the upgrade. Chris Brogran, famed Twitterer and blogger, reported that his upgrade didn’t take and he had to roll back his installation. Sounds like the Wordpress team needs to spend a little time looking into this, huh?
I realized in my quest to build a new theme for my blog that as I did validation testing on the markup that it didn’t validate (against the XHTML 1 Strict DTD - because I am a little Geek OCD when it comes to my markup). After a bit of inspection I realized that it was the stupid YouTube code that I copied from their site that was throwing off my validation.
Apparently YouTube thinks that everyone that puts their code into a site writes their markup under the transitional DTD. How stupid is that? A la:
<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rw8gE3lnpLQ&hl=en"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rw8gE3lnpLQ&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed>
</object>
Well I wasn’t about to be told that I cannot have valid XHTML in my code. After all, I took the time to make sure the core code was valid, why should I tolerate invalid markup injected into my code by YouTube or Wordpress or anyone? Exactly.
My solution? Simple. Google.
And Google, being the friend to me that is always has been, helped me right from the go. It took me Valid XHTML to Embed a YouTube Video. After reading some of the goodness on this tutorial I read the comments. And lo and behold, I ran across another tidbit of goodness that all bloggers that are into valid XHTML output should look at.
The Valid XHTML YouTube embed code generator - Online tool is totally awesome. It is fast, clean and reliable. I have already used it twice and will more than likely be using for every video embed I post until I want (bad enough) to write a Wordpress plugin. Until then, if you are at all interested in keeping your XHTML template standards compliant, hit this little converter up because it rocks.
And just so I can prove myself to not be a liar… remember that little YouTube generated code snippet above? This is how it comes out afterward:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:344px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rw8gE3lnpLQ">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rw8gE3lnpLQ" />
</object>
<div style="font-size: 0.8em">
<a href="http://www.tools4noobs.com/online_tools/youtube_xhtml/">Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code</a>
</div>
Yeah, I thought it was great too. Enjoy.