I have attached four links for lesson #3 - Validating Sites
I ran into some confusion with the Adcontent site when I tried to use what I thought was a recommended tag for the image.
Unlike HTML, which lets you open certain elements like p, img or li without explicitly closing them, in XHTML, you must close all of your tags. You can also close the opening tag itself (that is, make it "self-closing"), by adding a space and a forward slash ("/") at the end of the tag.
I tried the added space and forward dash and was called on it being an error, once I removed the space all was good. That confused me. After numerous trial and error applications for tagging and renaming files I was able to get the coveted seal.
The attached site is from the school where I teach. This web site is designed with a template through First Class
which often has it's own ways of doing things and can cause issues right away. However, in reviewing and even going to the extent of copying and making corrections I found that most of the errors occurred in the nesting of the tags particularly in unordered lists. The site I evaluated was
SAU 45.
The validation link is:
sau 45 validation report
All document encoding was established, with the looser xhtml transitional being the doctype. Using a strict
validation format for evaluating numerous errors were found. Most errors were caused by tags that were incomplete or missed entirely within the list. It becomes a trickle down effect where one omission caused numerous other errors. Once a list tag was inserted many errors were corrected such as closing tag incorrect placement for an unordered list. The other area of errors can be easily corrected were removing a closing font tag where no font had been established, and placing an a required attribute for text only browers with the alternative for an image source.
I was able to obtain the W3C coveted seal of approval for the site but without any of the CSS formatting. This coveted version would be visible through this link: corrected version.
To sum up my experience, there are still messages that I have to really dig at to fully comprehend what I'm being told, but the help that is offered through links on W3C validation are invaluable. And this is a tool that I can easily use, personally, with the tech dept. at school and with students. Thanks for the enlightenment!