Code Validation

Okay, pick the standard you're going to write to -- XHTML Strict 1.0 is pretty well the top of fully supported standards, and if you choose to go that route, you need to close all your tags, even the meta, br, hr, image, and link tags. To do this, you add a space and a forward slash before the closing angle bracket -- or

All tags need to be lowercase, and closed and some attributes are no longer valid in the HTML, but are in the CSS, so you should move them to the CSS files.

If you choose to use a lower standard, HTML 4.01 Loose is probably the best bet for you. But if you are able, give XHTML 1.0 Strict a shot. You CAN use tables for layout even in XHTML 1.0 Strict, but they may not work as you intend them to work without a bit of a learning curve for you and CSS, so you'll have to decide.

The DOCTYPE isn't what fits your code, it's what your code fits. i.e. it's the standard that your code is written to, it doesn't do anything other than tell browsers to render your page based on the set of rules in that standard (and the validator what rules to check your code against).

You'll find the errors will disappear quickly when you fix the major errors, as you can have cascading errors -- instead of 150, you may only have 50, but 100 of them are errors only because they are contained within something with an error.

Good luck!

Thanks. I gave it a shot with the transitional/loose and fixed what I could. I won't go thru all the errors but I have a few questions I don't understand to get me on the right path. Here's the new link http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://pstvalumni.com/pstv-template2.php

Line 19, column 27: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND"

I think I understand the explaination that background is a IE only tag (which I didn't think it was) but I need to use some IE specific tags. In this and similar cases, are there adjustments to the DOCTYPE that can specefy that I use attributes like "background" and "bordercolor"

Line 47, column 73: there is no attribute "ALT"

Right below this is the part of my code in question with a little red arrow pointing to where there is no "alt" tag..... but there is an "alt" tag right there. So why is it giving me this error saying that it's not there when it is?

Finally there are lots of errors referring to line 56. This is a code that is from pphlogger (logging). I don't know why but that's the code I need to use for that application. Does this mean that there's no way my code can ever validate (without removing my stat logging)?

Thanks for the guidance. By the way, I got the errors down from 150 to just a dozen.

the background attribute isnt supported in HTML 4. You should specify background images and colours in your stylesheet instead.

And alt is an attribute, but not for that element.

should be:

Also,

line 80:

Or you can use & instead of & or ; alone. And don't forget to put quotes around your attribute values!