Re: www.ny-unique

On 24 Aug 2009, at 18:39, Rick Horvath wrote:

> www.ny-unique 56 ERRORS
>
> I was not the original designer, but maintain the site and am  
> concerned about its search engine rankings.
>
> Now I know it's a older site by design, but give me break, most of  
> your 'errors' are not valid especially the flash code which is
> generated by a program.

You are incorrect. The program is generating code that does not  
conform to the HTML specification.

> I see things saying tags are not closed, when they really are - so  
> how am I to know what to do??

The first instance of that error that I can find is:

Line 46, Column 69: end tag for "SPAN" omitted, but its declaration  
does not permit this

This is immediately followed by:

Line 47, Column 8: end tag for element "SPAN" which is not open

It looks like you have a number of elements which are not closed in  
the order they open.

HTML describes a hierarchy. Elements can contain other elements. This  
forms a tree structure. An element can not contain the start of  
another element if it does not also contain the end of that element.


> The homepage DOES follows HTML guidelines,

No, it doesn't. If it did, then the validator would not point out  
errors in it. (OTOH, validation does not confirm conformance to  
everything in the specification, only to the subset that is described  
by the DTD portion of it).

> it does not use a style sheet, but that's fine.

"""
We recommend that authors and implementors observe the following  
general principles when working with HTML 4.

2.4.1 Separate structure and presentation
HTML has its roots in SGML which has always been a language for the  
specification of structural markup. As HTML matures, more and more of  
its presentational elements and attributes are being replaced by other  
mechanisms, in particular style sheets. Experience has shown that  
separating the structure of a document from its presentational aspects  
reduces the cost of serving a wide range of platforms, media, etc.,  
and facilitates document revisions.

"""

   — http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/intro.html#h-2.3.5

Your two statements contradict each other.

> Most of the error messages don't make any sense to an experienced  
> programmer/designer.

They are accompanied by detailed explanations, which often link to  
even more detailed explanations. The validator is not designed to  
teach HTML to beginners. It is a tool that finds errors. It can help  
people learn by pointing out their mistakes (and, in many cases,  
providing some hints as to possible solutions), but you should look to  
a tutorial ( http://opera.com/wsc/ ) and the specification ( http://w3.org/TR/html/ 
  ) to learn the correct way to write markup.

> So I need to know what to ignore.

Nothing.

> How about allowing more standard code to validate???

All standard code does, by definition, validate.

HTML 5 will even make some things that are now errors be conformant.

(Please direct responses to the www-validator mailing list and not  
directly to me. Thanks)

-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk

Received on Monday, 24 August 2009 19:01:41 UTC