Stylehack

Oh NO!  You worked hard, shed blood/sweat/tears over your web page. But when you tried to validate it, the W3C validator said you have errors! What should you do? The easiest answer is shut your computer off and spend some time with “live people”. But since you’re reading this, I guess that’s not what you want to hear. “-) Ok, my first question back to you is: have you taken any training in web coding standards? If not, your first step is to take the Build a Web Site series of classes at LVS Online. The more you learn, the less mistakes you’ll make in your coding. The instructors in those classes are very knowledgable and not anywhere near as crabby and mean as I am. “-) Even the best of us will still have errors from time to time, so let’s talk about how to use the results of the validation process to fix the problems. It’s really quite simple:

1. READ the comment and THINK about what it is saying, then ACT on it. For instance, if you see “xyz is not a valid attribute of ABC” try removing the invalid declaration(s). Check your page — does it still look the same? (Yes it will.) Re-validate. If the page validates and it still looks/performs as desired, you’re done. (If this doesn’t work, see #2 below.) Sometimes the results will even use wording similar to “xyz is not valid here. This usually is because blah blah blah.” Gasp! It even gives you some ideas of why something might be invalid!

2. RESEARCH the offending issue on the W3C site. Look up ABC and read what the valid attributes are and use them instead of xyz. At the top of each results page with problems, you will see something like this:      This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Guess what? The XHTML (or HTML if you are using that standard) is CLICKABLE and takes you to the specs themselves so you can easily research your problems.

See? That’s not so hard is it! The more you do this, the more comfortable you will be with using this tool to create clean, well-structured documents on the web. There’s one other site you may find helpful — W3C Schools (not affiliated with the W3C itself). There are some good reference areas there for both coding and CSS. Be advised, however, that not everything there is cast in stone… I have run across the odd item that elicits a “Hmmm, that’s not exactly correct/complete”. Links to Resources mentioned in this article Online Classes    Build Your Web Site classes at LVSOnline    http://register.lvsonline.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=build
W3C Validator Links    Explanation of Error Messages    http://validator.w3.org/docs/errors.html    Very Frequently Asked Questions about Errors (List starts here)    http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-doctype    HTML 4.01 Specs    http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/    XHTML 1.0 Specs    http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/    X/HTML Validator Page (type in your links or upload your local page)    http://validator.w3.org/    CSS Validator Page (type in your link, upload a file or validate a block of text)    http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/    CSS Validation FAQs    http://www.websitedev.de/css/validator-faq
Other Resources    W3C Schools HTML 4.01 Reference    http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_reference.asp    W3C Schools XHTML 1.0 Reference    http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_reference.asp    W3C Schools CSS2 Reference    http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp