Re: your Validator

Dear Sir,

Whatever may be your frustrations with the validator, I consider your 
angry, misinformed and somewhat xenophobic tone to be completely 
inappropriate. The people on this mailing-list are volunteers from 
around the world nicely providing help to people who request it, but a 
proper conduct is a minimum if you wish to be helped.

On Dec 15, 2004, at 23:06, Jar Head wrote:
> Hello -- I would like to know, WHO IN THE SAME HELL set-up your 
> Validator and why in the hell do you NOT provide the EXACT CODE to 
> place in our websites, instead of that STUPID-ASSED GENERIC "this 
> isn't right" code???

A validator's job is to point out errors, not to perform automatic 
repair. Other tools, such as tidy, do this, although automatic repair 
is often imperfect, and it is also useful to know how to understand how 
to fix them yourself.


>   Apparently, it was written by some DAMN FOREIGNER !!!

May I remind you that this is a mailing-list of the *world wide* web 
consortium? "Foreigner" does not make much sense in this context... And 
insulting people is not quite the best way to get them to help you.


> I'd like for you to explain the following errors in my code, as I 
> can't understand ONE DAMN ITEM of it!!!
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgovtrav.net

I read the validation results page and I see:
- that your document lacks a doctype. The validation results page tells 
me that a document needs a "doctype" to be validated, and the "tell me 
more" link[1] tells me how to add one.

[1] http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-doctype

- likewise, it says that your document does not have a declaration of 
its encoding, and gives link to fix this issue

- scrolling down, I see quite a few markup errors, nothing  awful, a 
few attributes that do not exist in the HTML specifications (just 
remove them) and images missing an "alt" attribute, which is mandatory. 
If I did not know how to fix it, a quick web search would easily give 
me clues of how to add such an attribute to the img element.

And so on, and so forth... The error messages are not always very 
helpful, but most of the times the explanations that come with it, or a 
quick web search, give the necessary information to fix the error.

I suggest learning a little more HTML and a little more patience will 
help you much.

Regards,
-- 
olivier