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Upcoming Methodology Change to eBay Site

Overview

We are currently changing our coding methodology to support well-formed HTML documents by eliminating missing tags from the generated HTML. There are three primary reasons for this change:

• Eliminate the "blank screen" error in Netscape and other strict browsers.
• Provide more cross platform compatibility now and into the future
• Speed development time

In some cases, products that extract data directly from or submit data directly to eBay pages may be affected by this change. Although we do not anticipate the effect on any software or Web site to be significant, we want to make sure that developers have adequate time to prepare.

Note: This change will not affect programs that interact with the site exclusively through the eBay API or the Mister Lister Reviewer.

Technical Details

Generally, the code changes will be limited to making the HTML on our site well formed. This means that all tags must be closed and that no tags can cross. These changes should be obvious in the source code of any function that we modify to support this.

Empty tags, or any HTML tag that does not have a corresponding close tag, for example:

etc., will now be modified to include a " /" at the end, for example:

etc. This will only relate to non-paired tags, so markup such as

or

will never appear with a " />" at the end.

If a tag has arguments, such as:

the " /" is added after all of the arguments:

In addition, there will be a few minor visual changes, such as changing the list of Payment Terms on the sample Sell Your Item form to one column instead of three.

An example of these changes can be seen in the source code of this page:

http://pages.ebay.com/preview/ListItemForSaleShow.html

Note that these changes will not pertain to any HTML generated by eBay sellers.

Although the schedule is subject to change, we are anticipating new code to roll out for the following pages over the next few months.

Details of the changes are being sent via email to developer contacts at the following companies:

Please help us by alerting other developers to this announcement who may be affected by this change and directing them to this announcement.

For those developers looking to more tightly integrate their Web site, software, or service with eBay check out our Developers Program at http://developer.ebay.com/.