Validator not much cop

[Phil Ainley]

Hi,

Iran the validator over my website and it returned some errors.

I then worked on the site and revalidated it. It then returned more errors
than before, some of these errors are questioning this icon > at the end of
a tag.

I cannot sort this problem out, which is now a major problem because the
local Chambers are now advising companies not to use agencies that don't
display the W3C logo even if they have been designing successful websites
for more than a decade!

Can you help at all?

Please see www.flockofpigs.co.uk


Thanks
Phil


Kind regards,
Phil Ainley ­ Creative Director



Flock of Pigs Ltd
Floor 2, 1 Livsey Street
Rochdale
Lancs. OL16 1SS

T: 01706 716272
M: 07773 168301
F: 01706 759254
E: phil@...
www.flockofpigs.co.uk

Graphic Design . Branding . Websites . Brochure Design . Advertising

³Flock of Pigs¹ design doesn¹t cost money ...it makes money!²

[Tatham Oddie]

Hi Phil,

All of the errors reported by the validator seem accurate to me.

You may now be getting more errors because some of the initial errors
prevented the validator from being able to find everything on the first go.

Some quick notes:

A) the first error is that you have a <style> tag instead of <style
type="text/css"> - this is an easy fix as you're just missing the required
'type' attribute

B) attributes like width, height and background can't be used on tables
(they should be applied via CSS instead)

C) you have a lot of text wrapped in br tags (for example: <br>Floor 2, 1
Livsey Street</br>) but this isn't valid as the br element isn't allowed to
contain content. Most of these instances seem to be addresses, which could
be marked up like the following instead:

    <address>
        Floor 2, 1 Livsey Street<br/>
        Some suburb<br/>
        ABC123 UK
    </address>

For more information about the address element, look at
http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/address/. You might also find the hCard
microformat interesting: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

Those three approaches will get you most of the way there, but you still
have some invalid tag nesting. (Something is missing the close tag, which is
likely to break your layout in strange ways.)


Thanks,

Tatham Oddie
blog: tath.am
au mob: [phone], us cell: [phone], skype: tathamoddie,
landline: [phone], fax: [phone]
current project: tixi.com.au – Ticketing without the dramas


-----Original Message-----
From: www-validator-request@... [mailto:www-validator-request@...] On
Behalf Of Phil Ainley
Sent: Tuesday, 3 November 2009 3:22 AM
To: www-validator@...
Subject: Validator not much cop

Hi,

Iran the validator over my website and it returned some errors.

I then worked on the site and revalidated it. It then returned more errors
than before, some of these errors are questioning this icon > at the end of
a tag.

I cannot sort this problem out, which is now a major problem because the
local Chambers are now advising companies not to use agencies that don't
display the W3C logo even if they have been designing successful websites
for more than a decade!

Can you help at all?

Please see www.flockofpigs.co.uk


Thanks
Phil


Kind regards,
Phil Ainley ­ Creative Director



Flock of Pigs Ltd
Floor 2, 1 Livsey Street
Rochdale
Lancs. OL16 1SS

T: 01706 716272
M: 07773 168301
F: 01706 759254
E: phil@...
www.flockofpigs.co.uk

Graphic Design . Branding . Websites . Brochure Design . Advertising

³Flock of Pigs¹ design doesn¹t cost money ...it makes money!²

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Tatham Oddie wrote:

> All of the errors reported by the validator seem accurate to me.

They are usually accurate, though not always easy to understand without
knowing SGML or XML. The explanations after the error messages help to see
what the point is, in most cases, though they are inevitably somewhat
generic.

> B) attributes like width, height and background can't be used on
> tables (they should be applied via CSS instead)

The width attribute is valid

> C) you have a lot of text wrapped in br tags (for example: <br>Floor
> 2, 1 Livsey Street</br>) but this isn't valid as the br element isn't
> allowed to contain content.

A typical misunderstanding caused by an attempt to use XHTML. When the
author has started using XHTML, it is probably best to proceed in that path,
but it means that one needs read a good tutorial on XHTML.

> Most of these instances seem to be
> addresses, which could be marked up like the following instead:
>
>     <address>
>         Floor 2, 1 Livsey Street<br/>
>         Some suburb<br/>
>         ABC123 UK
>     </address>

In the specific case of the address for the document author, yes. That's
what <address> means by definition. If there are other addresses and they
need to be fixed syntactically anyway, it is best to fix them in a
semantically correct way. In that case there is no better markup than <div>,
optionally with a class="..." attribute to make styling easier. Within a div
element, you could use inner div elements, so that each line would be
written as <div>...</div>, resembling the structure that the current invalid
markup is supposed to represent.

> Those three approaches will get you most of the way there, but you
> still have some invalid tag nesting. (Something is missing the close
> tag, which is likely to break your layout in strange ways.)

Fixing the errors already pointed out helps with most of the problems if not
all, and it will be much easier to see the remaining problems, if any. A the
end of line 169, there is an unmatched </br>, which causes somewhat
confusing error messages, but using just <br /> tags instead of <br> and
</br> (or using <div>...</div> markup) should fix this.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/