Can anyone tell me where I may be able to find some good web forms that will validate through W3C. I tried Responce-O-Matic and It gets a little crazy on the errors. Please someone help me and if you like you can look at the code and see if I may be able to get these issues fixed with the current form. http://www.countrycustomtile.com/quote1.html I am not even going to try to finish the page until I figure something out, Thanks so much in advance,
Problem is the doctype is XHTML and the code generated from the form site isn't XHTML. Change the doctype and over half the errors go away.
I new to all this but I thought you would want to stay with the new document types. I just want a form that validates. Is it or isn't it good to have validated pages. Does it help or not. I'm asking because I dont know. The original form that I had was a set up in dreamweaver as mailto and I would sometimes have folks calling me asking why I have not contacted them. I need a form that works and if its a good thing, I need it to validate. The below is what I get from W3C I'm searching the forums and google and i'm not finding much on it. I'm real new to this and i'm trying to learn, but it's not that easy. I dont have a webmaster right now and i'm trying to get my site to W3C standards because I was told thats what I have to do for different broswers, SEO etc. Is what I have been told true or not. Line 63, Column 28: there is no attribute "height". <table width="426" height="212" border="0" align="center"> Line 63, Column 51: there is no attribute "align". <table width="426" height="212" border="0" align="center"> Line 66, Column 16: there is no attribute "width". <td width="416"><!-- Begin Response-O-Matic Form --> Line 181, Column 4: end tag for "br" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified. <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 181, Column 0: start tag was here. <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 181, Column 11: element "center" undefined. <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 181, Column 23: there is no attribute "face". <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 181, Column 47: there is no attribute "size". <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 181, Column 50: element "font" undefined. <br><center><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="1"><b> Line 199, Column 12: there is no attribute "align". <p align="left"><strong>We are equipped to handle all phases of tile & Line 184, Column 45: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: br line 181 and td. <!-- End Response-O-Matic Form --> </td> Line 185, Column 9: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: td line 66 and tr. </tr> Line 186, Column 10: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: tr line 65 and table. </table> Line 187, Column 8: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: table line 63 and div. </div> Line 276, Column 7: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: div line 59 and body. </body>✉ Line 277, Column 7: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: body line 43 and html. </html> Line 277, Column 7: XML Parsing Error: Premature end of data in tag html line 3. </html>
hey if u wanna use js there are forms it can validate.. check here jsmadeeasy.com/ under forms, there are plenty of validation techniques used
The form should validate. What it validates as is up to you. Lots of opinions, lots of reasons to not use this or that. But the issues you are having are from mixing up two sources of code. Problem is, its really hard to sit here and tell you what to do to fix it. Dreamweaver has its way of doing things and the response-o-matic form generator another. I can't tell you how to fix it. Now if Dreamweaver lets you set the Doctype and you went back to HTML 4, you should be ok between using DW and response-o-matic. Avoid using the mailto's they are not a real solution. One simple thing you can do is open up Dreamweaver in code view and do a search and replace for <br> with <br />. It will get rid of some of those errors. The "there is no attribute width" or "align" stems from using XHTML and those attributes have been depreciated. Browsers will still accept them.
I really apprciate the information from you all. I will definitly look into what you are saying. I understand using Dreamweaver and response coding together can cause problems. Like I said i'm really new to this and I greatly appreciate the information and help. I'm trying to learn but to be honest it's not that easy to me. I'm a tile setter not a webmaster "LOL". As far as the javascript goes how will that be with different browsers and search engines. Once again thanks so much for the help. Also, do you think that form will work ok and will it be a problem with my site as far as the search engines are concerned. What I mean is will the rest of my site be affected with the search engines because of that page not validating.
First, pick a doctype. Whatever the rest of your page is, is what the form should be. Your choice is generally HTML4.01 Strict (there's really no reason people can't do Strict) or XHTML 1.0 Strict. Between the two there is really no advantage, not for a company website anyway. Learning the differences between the two can be a little hard, but see the validator can end up telling you a lot (and you'll never learn this stuff fast, only gradually, there's just too much of it). You have a problem understanding what the validator means when it says you can't do this or that... esp since it's not always pointing in the right direction. The validator only makes sense when you already know the rules : ) I stuck a basic form in another thread. Styling a form with CSS will remove a lot of the errors, as before there was CSS people had things like height="blah" margin="blah" in the HTML and a lot of that stuff doesn't validate anymore. A table might be easier for you to get the form how you want it to look, but you don't have to use a table. Any kind of script can do the work of the form. It doens't have to be Javascript... in fact, whatever the script is, it should be doing its work on your server, so that anyone can fill in the form (even if they have Javascript or any other script disabled). Popular scripts are written in PHP, Python, Perl, JS... you can pretty much take your pick but try to find a modern one (there are apparently a lot of old ones out there). *edit just looked at the form. Don't worry about search engines finding the form or reading it. You want them to find your site, but who cares about the form? There's a lot of junk and gunk in the form but the important part for most people is the script. The script needs to work, and send that info to you. The form's not terrible accessible to those with non-visual browsers. Remember that the disabled use the Internet more in their daily lives than the average population. The form uses spans to convey what should be a label. The labels should be linked to the inputs with for="something" and the "something" needs to match the inputs' id's (your inputs do have id's so that's not a problem). The main page has a lot of inline styles... like every single <p> having align-left or whatever. In the internal styles part of the page (where you have a bit of CSS in the <head> part) you could say something like #story p { text-align: left; } Although left is the default if you don't say anything either way. You font is also damn small but that seems to be popular among company web sites.
go to this site.... you will get result.... http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/15/HNxforms_1.html
Validation is a tool to help you. Ain't got to be fanatical about it. Key as Stomme pointed out is does the form do what you need it to do? Does it let people request information from you. If it does that, validation would be gravy. Now if the form wasn't working properly or displaying correctly, first step would be to make it validate.