Two validators report different results.

Good morning.

I am a programmer and currently I am dealing with conversion of books containing lots of tables.
I had to validate some tables and I used 2 different tools:

  *   https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea
  *   https://wet-boew.github.io/wet-boew-legacy/v3.1/demos/tableparser/validator-htmltable.html

I found a case in which I get different results.

<html lang='en'>
<head><title>dummy</title></head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
  <td colspan="2">text</td>
  <td>1</td>
  <td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td colspan="2">text</td>
  <td>1</td>
  <td>2</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Nu Html Checker reports an error: Table column 2 established by element td has no cells beginning in it.
WEP table validator reports Ok

Who is correct?

It is not a big issue but it is confusing.

If I can say my point of view ... I see table as syntactically correct (all rows have the same number of columns, all tags are properly opened and closed) even if it does not make sense to set the same colspan on all first cells of each row.

To be fully transparent, i am writing this mail to both programs.


Thank you
Alessandro Susta

Alessandro Susta
Senior Product Software Engineer
*/dxg - Digital eXperience Group
Wolters Kluwer Italy S.r.l.
Office +39 02 82476 455
alessandro.susta@wolterskluwer.com<mailto:alessandro.susta@wolterskluwer.com>
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Received on Thursday, 12 February 2026 16:59:59 UTC