CSS Validation

There is a site that I am helping try to get straightened out. The person I am helping is absolutely Hung Up on the fact that the CSS is not validating (using w3c) and she keeps getting the following error "exception:javax.servlet.ServletException: Timed out". When I do a search on that term, everything I am reading is basically coming back to "oh well, no big deal as long as the HTML validates". Is it?

 

It's possible the validator is overloaded so try back later. If not that, then we need to see the code or a link to help.

 

I'm getting it on multiple validator's. The site I am checking is www.drcarol.com. Any help would be appreciated.

 

My guess is that the validator(s) are getting confused with which stylesheet to scan. Your friend's HTML links to two stylesheets in different locations, however the second redirects to the homepage which is in .asp format.

I ran the following (working stylesheet) through the W3C CSS Validator and it worked fine:

drcarol.com/v/vspfiles/templates/50/css/Imports.css

If you try the above link it should work. As for "drcarol.com/50/css/Imports.css" this stylesheet I don't see a purpose in it being on the website. I'd get your friend to remove this line of code from the HTML, then the validator should validate the pages properly without getting errors.

<link href="50/css/Imports.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Code (markup):

 

Great! I will send your message along to her and let you know what happens.

 

Yes, it is quite overloaded job to valid css . I usually valid the xhtml/html code only and try to make css valid as much as possible .

 

the validator always helps you to find the error

 

Tell her to sit down with a cup of coffee/tea and forget about it.

HTML/CSS validation isn't the end of the world and I really can't understand why so many get so hung up on it.

So many sites out there don't validate yet work perfectly fine.

Look at Microsoft - hardly any of their pages validate and they have thousands and thousands.

Some of my pages on my website don't validate, it's something that is at the bottom of my "to-do" list.

 

Just use the validate by direct input option for Christ sake

 

I would love to do this but she is soooooo hung up on it. She is concentrating on details that can wait when what she really needs to do is concentrate on her marketing. I looked over preliminary numbers last night and from what I can see she is not far off from this time last year but she seems to think this CSS issue is causing her to lose hits and money.

 

Rubish no one is going to check a site's CSS is "valid" before they start browsing it, give her a slap.

 

As far as I'm aware CSS or HTML validation doesn't matter - I might be wrong but I really don't think it does as I can't imagine any search engine validating the HTML/CSS before marking the site?

When you validate a page how long does it take? Yup, quite a few seconds. Imagine that number of seconds taken per page per site. Analysing a site could take forever for a search engine to validate.

Show her this topic - hopefully that'll persuade her.

 

My sentiments exactly!

 

I think she believes that Google is not indexing all of her pages because of it. I'm going to try and fix it, to make her happy. She is really stressing on this and it is overflowing onto moi

 

Got the CSS fixed! Now I just have to do something about the search feature. It is picking up words from descriptions instead of sticking to the titles and keywords. Any ideas? She said it is in the Javascript but I do not know what she means.

 

CSS And XHTML validation is extreamly important! Their trying to eliminate problems running webpages across multiple browsers. When you write proper code your web pages should all function and view the same no matter
what browser you use.

 

Agree whole heartedly. Invalid pages have errors. If you wish to rely on errors to work everywhere, good luck with that, but don't come crying to us with your problems when it doesn't.

 

See Google Webmaster Central. Google prefers to use the meta description as the snippet shown in the search results page. It ought to be good since the page's author wrote it, right? Google ignores meta keywords, but does pay attention to headings and text.

cheers,

gary

 

The CSS code is validating now. And the search feature (internal - not Google) is working properly again. The problem now is that the top navigation menu is not formatting properly. Anyone have any ideas?