I am not a web designer and I recently started my blog using Blogger. When I edit my template, I see DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict at the top. I validate my blog at w3.org However, after validation, it throws many errors. My questions are: a. How important is it to get an error-free template code? b. Is error-free code important for cross browser compatibility? c. Will my web page load faster, if it's error-free?
You will probably get varying answers on this. So long as the website looks good across all browsers and all platforms some would argue that it doesn't matter. However as future versions of browsers are released who knows if they will correctly display your site if there are errors. Yes. Some browsers are better at handling errors than other browsers. Sometimes and error can be easily dealt with by the browser and thus the page will still draw okay. Other times some browsers really don't know what you were asking it to do and something will break on the page. However, just because the page validates does not guarantee that some browser won't incorrectly render something. Probably not in a way that would be distinguishable to a human. Assuming the page validated before you made any changes, there probably are not as many real errors as the validator says. Often once the validator hits one error it cascades into multiple errors that wouldn't ordinarily be there if it wasn't for the first error. So even if a validator says you have 47 errors (for example) fixing the first few might make the rest disappear as well.