Open Realty UK

Template Validation

Validation: css xhtml html

If your HTML is not valid, or you use syntax in your CSS which is not correct, then you have a much greater chance that your style sheet based web pages won't work. This final section looks at the process of validating and checking our HTML and CSS code.

Validating HTML

Why validate?

Browsers which support style sheets are very choosey about HTML. Minor problems with your HTML which might "work" by themselves, can cause all sorts of dilemmas when style sheets are applied. This is why we need to move beyond "it looks fine in IE and Netscape on my computer" testing of our pages. To ensure your HTML is correct, it needs to be validated.

Some HTML editing tools like HomeSite have validators built in. There are also a couple of very good ones online, from HTML Help and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You can also find downloadable validators that run on your own computer.

What is validating?

Validators ensure that your HTML conforms to one of the World Wide Web Consortium recommendations for HTML. Validating is a good habit to get into as it ensures that your pages work on browsers other than those you have "tested" it on, especially those which will come in future, and which may not maintain bugs and general leniency to imperfect HTML which current browsers tend to have.

In short, the latest HTML recommendation from the W3C is HTML 4.0. This version of HTML has three flavors, strict, transitional (or loose) and frameset. The strict variant excludes all presentational markup (such as elements), while transitional includes these elements. Frameset includes support for frames.