validation 101 article

Hello,

I do not know how many of you know the www-validator mailing-list. It's 
both a discussion forum, and, to some extent, a user help forum, for 
the markup validator (and a few other tools related to it). You may 
want to subscribe if you feel like helping people validate their sites 
or you are interested in the validator.

Today we received on this list a request that said:
> I'd like to redo the html on my website and am unable to vallidate the 
> html from your site.
> I'm wondering if you have any tips to help me get started.

While this was not the first time I had seen the question, I could not 
remember ever seeing an actual, complete but concise answer to this 
question, that would provide some kind of "validation 101" guidance for 
people who've learned tag soup somehow, and are intrigued by validation 
without knowing much how it's done.

So I wrote back:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2005Sep/0072

A word of warning: it's an e-mail written quickly and at dawn :) so 
it's not very well written. But I think it has all the basic 
principles: learn *real* HTML, fix one error at the time, and check out 
the collective knowledge (then ask for help) on the Web when you feel 
stuck. If cleaned up a bit, I think this text would be a really good 
article for web magazines or such publications.

I would therefore appreciate if you could review it, and pour in other 
ideas if you think there is something crucial I forgot, or if I said 
something you disagree with... Also, if you are aware of similar (i.e 
concise articles, not full books) resources, it would be interesting to 
catalogue them somehow.

Thanks a lot.
-- 
olivier

Received on Wednesday, 21 September 2005 23:45:20 UTC