validating question

[mwjansen]

after reading through here, i finally put my site through http://validator.w3.org/.

however, i don't understand all of the errors it listed. here's one in particular:

 

Line 67, Column 5: end tag for "DIV" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.

</div>

 

and another:

Line 78, Column 179: end tag for "font" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.

 

what exactly does that mean?

[haku]

It means you have entered an opening div tag, but didn't put in a closing div tag. Same goes for the font tag.

[mwjansen]

that's what i initially thought, but i checked and where its indicated, i do have open and closing tags. that's what is confusing me.

[haku]

Got a link to the page? I'll look at it for you.

 

There is definitely a missing tag, I've never seen or even heard of the validator making a mistake. It may be that you have a weird character being used that's screwing it up, or it may be that the closing tag you think you have is actually closing a different tag somewhere.

 

If those errors are not the first errors in the list, fix the ones that come before. Often/usually, errors further down the list will disappear, as they aren't actually errors, but just appear so to the validator, due to the previous errors.

[mwjansen]

www.twinwheeladventures.com

admittedly i haven't tried to fix any of the earlier errors yet. what you say makes sense though.

[haku]

Looking at your page, it's definitely the result of not correcting earlier errors first. They compound - you have one error earlier in the page that screws up the validator, so then it finds something that actually is correct, but because of the earlier error, looks like an error to the validator. It's better just to fix them in order.

 

One problem you have though is that you are using capital letters in some of your div tags. XHTML only accepts small letters. As a result, you have  <DIV> tag, and you have a </div> tag, but those two tags don't match as far as the validator is concerned.

[mwjansen]

just got back from working/riding .

thanks haku, i really appreciate you looking at it for me. i will check the case in my tags at the same time, and then run it through the validator again.

[haku]

You should definitely switch everything to lowercase. But again, you should always fix the first error, then re-validate. If you start fixing errors lower down the list, you may actually be adding errors to places where they don't exist, rather than fixing errors that do.

[mwjansen]

But again, you should always fix the first error, then re-validate.  

i was thinking that was probably the way to go, thanks for confirming.