Hello,
when I click on the Validate the XHTML of my pages and it bring me to the validation page…it shows a lot of error’s, and then when I validate the CSS, it also shows a few errors…and says that sme of my background colors are not valid colors.
how important is it to have everything on all my pages XHTML and CSS Valid?
…and if when trying to validate my CSS , and get the background color error’s, why then does it say it is not a valid color, if me and everyone else that views my page, can see my background color’s? or at least I think everyone that views them can see the background colors I am currently using.
so anyways was just hoping someone can explain to me in “Plain terms” what exactly this all means and how important it is?. Thanks for any help…Chris
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colornames.asp
" If you want your pages to validate with an HTML or a CSS validator, W3C has listed 16 color names that you can use: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. If you want to use other colors, you must specify their RGB or HEX value."
Hello Niko, and good morning…
can you explain to me how important it is for my pages to be validated, whether it is the XHTML or the CSS Validation…how important is it, and if it is not validadted, will anything bad happen.
I am just unfamiliar with this and was looking to gain some insight on what this all means and how important it may be
Thanks, Chris
Hello Niko,
thanks for the link…after reading it, and the “why” or “why not” should I validate my pages, or not…I think it would be a waste of time to try and fix them.
I used the validator page and entered the main WD page and it found about 87 error’s…then I entered the URL for this forum, and it also found about 11 error’s. then I treid entering your page(niko’s weather page)…and it also found error’s…so I guess this cant be very important to have everything validated.
as far as I know…everyone is seeing my website fine, and I have viewed it myself on friends computers, and it looks fine from their pc’s. one thing I do know about my pages is that some of them dont display properrly at the 800 by 600 screen resoultion, but I am not going to worry about that either. most user’s therse days are using at least 1024 by 768 screen res anyways…or higher screen res.
another factor would be to consider that my website/webpages are only for local weather data, as I am a weather enthusiast…weather hobbyist, and it is not like they are of the upmost importance on the world wide web…although the data I am feeding to them is accurate 99% of the time.
so, instead of me wasting hours and hours of time on this…everything will remain as is.
Thanks again Niko…chris
Put basically, validation simply is a way to make sure that the code you are using matches the doctype you have set.
Once you have gone through the trouble of getting the code right, you can easily find issues that crop up later down the road by doing a simple click. This is especially true for pages that have lots of complicated code in them.
HTML can be very easy to screw up, by leaving off a quote, missing a close element etc… Most browsers will compensate for such errors so that they continue to display something, but how they do it can be radically different. Many times, this is the reason why it looks okay on on browser but not at all on another.
What DocType you use, can make it simpler or harder to create your pages depending on how much you know about HTML. XHTML 1.1 is not necessarily the best. Many times, a simple HTML 4.01 works just fine.
You can also have different DocTypes for different pages to accommodate different requirements.
Lastly, the validation suites are guidelines. Some of what they specify is a general rule and doesn’t mean it will look good, or work properly. You have to visually look at your pages to help determine that. This is especially true when you move into accessibility validation where many of the checks have to be manually done.
A page can be very “pretty” but contain no useful content.
gateway2capecod:
Most people misconstrue what they see when they use a validator. When confronted with 87 errors… Many errors are simply a cascading event caused by the first errors seen. So when validating, you need to fix the first error first, and then revalidate. Many of the cascading errors will then disappear as they are not really errors.
hello kevin,
Thanks for your reply also.
chris
The whole web thing isn’t very important to me, so long as it works for my own purposes I’m happy 
But don’t let that influence your choices.
G’day Chris,
I suspect that you are using internet explorer as a browser (or another loose standard broweser) for the pages to still display ok. So if the masses that look at your page are IE based, then it’s not a real issue.
One thing that i have noticed with my pages when they had alot of errors is google won’t index my site.
When i’d started making my pages complient, and put in the doctype header, but the rest of the page wasn’t complient (about 1000+ errors), google had droped my site within a couple of days. It wasn’t till the next google slurp of my site after fully valid that i then reappeared in their index.
Cheers,
Dave.