Validation Errors On My Wordpress Blog - Please Help

I have a Wordpress blog hosted with Hostgator. I started having issues with the footer in my blog and it seems I have some HTML code in my footer and various other places that is causing problems for me. I downloaded my theme from Artisteer and their support people had me run a validation report and it's showing several errors that need to be fixed.

My stupid question is this. The report shows an error on Line 172, Column 1, for instance. How do I know where that column and line is? On some of the errors, I could tell by the content where they were located. (For instance, in one of my widgets.) But the rest of them I can't tell. I know that I can go to each individual page and/or post and click on the HTML tab, but I'm not sure which page or post some of the errors are located on or where on that page it's located. I'm assuming there must be somewhere I can go to view the HTML in my blog as a whole and find those specific line and column numbers, but I don't know where that is.

Second stupid question. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a validation report. Is it critical that I fix each and every one of these errors? Some of them I'm not visibly seeing how they're causing problems for me and I'm not understanding what it's telling me on how to fix it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

As long as you check cross brower and version compatibility and your page looks fine, don't worry about it for now. Just make sure you keep up to date with new browser versions and keep checking your site in these. There are also a number of plugins which produce validation errors also but they often won't effect your page display.

There are ways to fix this validation but you will need to understand css,html and probably some php to fix them.

 

Agree with the above. If you look at the page source of some of the busiest sites on the web ESPN, CNN etc, it will say that they have many, sometimes hundreds of warnings.
If you can fix them, fine. If it is affecting your load times, configuration or display, you definitely should fix them
If none of those are happening, I wouldn't sweat it right away.

To see the line numbers, you can download Notepad++ for free, and open your files with that, and you will see the line numbers to direct you to the offending code.

 

Thanks for all the great info.

 

You're most welcome...

On another note, when you say you downloaded your theme from Artisteer, do you mean you actually created a theme using the Artisteer software and exported it? Because Artisteer themes (in my experience) always come out xhtml and css compliant. I believe that's a big part of their sales pitch.

One thing that could also help identify the problem is individually disabling your plugins and revalidating. Sometimes plugins interact together badly causing validation errors etc.