CSS Validation Notes - Neils Resource Web

Coming soon. Under Development - Some notes I'm putting together on getting your HTML to pass W3's validation program. I'm using Frontpage 2003 and I know for a fact that there can be problems with this alone especially if you don't use IE as your browser. I've since moved on to Expression Web (back end of 2006) which I really like as it does really help to identify sloppy coding (just see what it does to pages that were fine in Frontpage!)

W3C Validator wants the following condition satisfied. Fine, if you know what to use. (See here for more details)

Error Line 1 column 0: no document type declaration; implying "<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>".

The checked page did not contain a document type ("DOCTYPE") declaration. The Validator has tried to validate with a fallback DTD, but this is quite likely to be incorrect and will generate a large number of incorrect error messages. It is highly recommended that you insert the proper DOCTYPE declaration in your document -- instructions for doing this are given above -- and it is necessary to have this declaration before the page can be declared to be valid.
I ended up using this one,

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Once added and the Validator run again even more errors result, because the Validator now has rules to compare with.

Line Break - Differences Between HTML and XHTML - In HTML the <br> tag has no end tag. In XHTML the <br> tag must be properly closed, like this: <br />. No big deal but easily done, Expression now tells you.

A lot of HTML errors are down to unrecognised tags, usually proprietary ones from the likes of Microsoft. Whilst these will display fine if you have something like Frontpage Extensions running on your host server, you will probably find that they can be avoided by perfectly valid CSS alternatives. The HTML Validator (link top right) will normally give you a clue.

Something that had me confused for a while when I was getting "NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES" warning message when validating some of my pages. I kind of understood what it was saying about using the / (backslash) in a url but couldn't work out why it was only appearing in my footer sections. Eventually I realised that my href=xxxxxxxx was missing enclosing quotes i.e, href="xxxxxxx" and as the footer was common to the pages so was the error! What a plonker.

Currently trying to work out why my Google analysis has started to report 404 on pages I cannot find when using the search function in Expression Web or broken link searches (Xenu). I know it is to do with sloppy Url encoding which is producing an unrecognisable url, e.g. 'ResourcesWeb5B/quote5DBars.htm', but even searching on the 'translated' version e.g. 'ResourceWeb[/quote]' fails to produce the location of the culprit. More on this if I find a solution.

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HTML Validation - Web Dev. - Neils Resource Web