W3C validation errors

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by opportunist86, Jun 27, 2014.

  1. #1
    W3C validator would point out 93 errors and 8 warnings on my site. I don't understand a single of them. How to correct them the easier way?
     
    opportunist86, Jun 27, 2014 IP
  2. COBOLdinosaur

    COBOLdinosaur Active Member

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    #2
    So no link to the page with the errors; no link to the validator list of the errors; no indication of what errors are listed.

    I think we will need to wait for a mind-reader or witch doctor to get you help with this. However validation errors simple mean that there are coding errors, and there is no easy way. You will need to fix the code.
     
    COBOLdinosaur, Jun 27, 2014 IP
  3. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #3
    COBOLdinosaur has it right that without seeing the page in question, it's near impossible to answer your question...

    Though with that many validation errors, it's likely the entire site structure and building methodology is totally banjaxed, and the entire site may need a complete rewrite from scratch; to the point it's quite possibly nothing short of a miracle it works.

    But that's a wild guess without seeing it.

    Really there is no 'easier' way, you either understand HTML and therein understand the errors the validator is giving you, or you don't. Anything "in-between" those two extremes is more placebo than reality.
     
    deathshadow, Jun 28, 2014 IP
  4. Helge Sverre

    Helge Sverre Prominent Member Affiliate Manager

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    #4
    Please provide a link to your site or a link to your W3Validator url.
     
    Helge Sverre, Jun 30, 2014 IP
  5. opportunist86

    opportunist86 Active Member

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    #5
    Sorry guys! I had no idea you people would be that much annoyed. Here's the link. stylishblinds (dot) net
     
    opportunist86, Jul 3, 2014 IP
  6. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #6
    First up, it didn't annoy us -- don't take anything we say personally on this; we're here to help, it was just hard to help. What follows might seem 'harsh' or hard to deal with, but it's just the honest truth. Harsh light of reality and so forth.

    Now that I can see the site, validation errors are the LEAST of your worries; massive space wasting whitespace and meaningless image banner rotator pushing content below the fold, pointlessly tiny logo you can't even see the text on, serif fonts on screen, non-responsive non-elastic fixed-width layout, undersized fixed metric (px) fonts -- it's a laundry list of how not to design a website.

    As to the code, which is really what you are asking about:

    1) Your first line proudly declares a lot of the problem; transitional, which is to say "in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices" -- Tranny is for using new stuff on sites written prior to 1998, NOT for building new sites any time after that.

    2) You've got a HTML 5 charset declaration in a XHTML doctype. There is no such thing in XHTML 1.0 as <meta charset="UTF-8">

    The appropriate version for that document type would be:
    <meta
    	http-equiv="Content-Type"
    	content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
    />
    Code (markup):
    You're also missing your language definitions.

    3) Your keywords meta is uselessly overstuffed and redundant

    4) IE conditional garbage for nothing. Those types of "tweaks" even for IE7 and use of STYLE in the markup usually means flawed sitebuilding methods.

    5) media="all" is as bad as not having a MEDIA attribute at all; your style is being sent to things it's completely inappropriate to do so with.

    6) Too many stylesheets for nothing.

    7) Oh, it's turdpress. Well there's your problem... -- endless pointless scripting for nothing and "I can haz intarnets" markup is a long standing hallmark of said system.

    8) MULTIPLE keywords and description meta, the "all in one SEO Pack" likely conflicting with some other plugin or the theme itself.

    9) slew of LINK and META nothing actually gives a flying purple fish about -- most of what's inside HEAD is just redundant nonsense and code bloat.

    10) style on the background tag, that belongs in the stylesheet not the markup.

    11) endless pointless DIV for nothing.

    12) "Grids" -- another item on the laundry list of how not to build a website, as it's filling the page with pointless DIV.

    13) unclosed DIV -- given how many of them are in there for nothing this isn't really a surprise.

    14) Clearing DIV like it's still 2001

    15) inline-level tags like A wrapping block level tags like H2. H2 cannot go inside an anchor, no matter what the HTML 5-tards say.

    16) headings where things are quite obviously NOT the start of a subsection of the page. (they're at the END, completely back-assward)

    17) paragraphs around UL, that makes no sense whatsoever.

    18) gibberish numbered heading orders, multiple H1, missing heading levels...

    19) half the tags that belong in a form missing from forms.

    20) comment placements that could trip IE and FF rendering bugs known as "double render" and "disappearing content" -- YES, I said COMMENTS tripping rendering errors (as stupid as that sounds)

    Bottom line: 22k of HTML for 3k of plaintext and 11 content images -- two to three times as much code as should have been used on such a simple page. The layout has major accessibility failings, and on the whole my initial guess about the site is correct...

    You need to pitch it in the trash and start over from scratch, using semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, progressive enhancement, semi-fluid elastic layout, and a whole host of other post 1998 development methods. There is little if anything there I'd even try to salvage, and throwing 'silver bullet fixes' at what you currently have really isn't the right answer and would in fact be more work that just chucking it in the bin and going at it from the beginning.

    Though many of the issues are entirely what I've come to expect from turdpress -- you're REALLY going to need someone who knows what they are doing with it to even come CLOSE to building a decent site using that steaming pile of developer ineptitude, and even then I've never seen a WP based site that didn't reek of ignorance, apathy, and wishful thinking. It just deludes normal people into thinking they can have a website, and really has no business being used... for business sites.

    If I have time later (aka insomnia kicks in) I might take a stab at a flat rewrite of that home page to show what a PROPERLY written version of the markup for that should look like, just to give you an idea how bad that really is. Good luck though convincing turdpress of that.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 3, 2014 IP
    COBOLdinosaur likes this.
  7. opportunist86

    opportunist86 Active Member

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    #7
    With so many errors and mistakes that you've pointed out, I feel its really a piece of crap. But I'm not a developer or a an expert. What I did was I just selected a theme that I liked on wordpress and without making change in coding or other things, i put my content. I don't understand all of the alien coding language you've mentioned above. I need some good suggestion. I really appreciate your help and efforts very much.
     
    opportunist86, Jul 4, 2014 IP
  8. COBOLdinosaur

    COBOLdinosaur Active Member

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    #8
    Then you either need to take the time to learn the basics, or hire a professional to do the work for you. This really is bad and you are not going to attract much traffic, because the search engines are going to pretty much ignore it because of poor content quality, accessibility issues, usability issues, technical errors, semantic errors, and a cookie-cutter design. With a bunch of money spent on advertising you might drive some traffic, but you will get very few return visits and a very low conversion rate.

    It is possible for a professional to use off the shelf junk to build a decent site, but it requires three times as much time to maintain, waste bandwidth, and is subject to instantly break from compatibility issues with every up date of theme and the widgets attached to it. It the case of Wordpress, it is not even a good learning tool because is is about as close to standards and quality as a toadstool is to a perfect pink rose.
     
    COBOLdinosaur, Jul 5, 2014 IP