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Blitzburgh
08-08-2005, 12:16 AM
For what it's worth, I do my web with Dreamweaver. Nothing spectacular, but HIGHLY functional and very good results in the SE's. Still, I would like to have a solid site that goes through W3 with less than 400 errors.

To start with, I threw in the html 4.01 strict. Didn't like that.

Then I tried the transitional. Still didn't like that.

So, for a novice, what would you recommend I place there?

Thanks, Mike
paulhiles
08-08-2005, 06:18 AM
The linked site in your signature profile only produced 7 or so errors, so not exactly horrendous! This is based on your current HTML code which is closest in appearance to HTML 4.01 Transitional. Just add the appropriate doctype (example below)

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
and follow the W3C's validator recommendations to fix those few errors. The two errors for background can be easily eliminated by adding those stylings to your existing "basic.css" stylesheet. In your navlist div you've got <ul> tags nested incorrectly. Finally, the id "centercontent" has been used twice, when it should only be used for a single occurrence. You might consider changing the "id" to a class instead.

Paul
wrmineo
08-08-2005, 06:34 AM
What version of DW are your running? MX2004 has "fixed" the error of simply beginning a doc with <html> - if you're using DW 6.0 this may be fixed by running the update/fix to 6.1.

I like the 401 transitional doctype that Paul posted for you - it seems more forgiving which is a big plus for me :)
wrmineo
08-08-2005, 06:44 AM
Oh...if you're talking about the index page of your site?:

>> replace "&" with "&amp;" to clear up four of your errors ....

>> for the js error, in your code view, after ..."javascript" begin typing "type" and you'll get a pop up menu of options in DW

>> background - Paul already mentioned these. If you can't put in your css right now, simply delete while you're trying to validate - you can always replace with a simple color command in DW that will validate, but not an image

>> for the UL/LI errors use
<ul>
listed items
[/list]

>> for the align errors - first try to delete and see how if affects the view - guessing it won't and if that's the case simply omit or find one that is acceptable

>> for your missing alt's you can actually put <empty> in the box in DW, else, in the code put alt=" ", or of course, put in some text

>> line 218 meta error = this belongs in the <head>

! Be sure to choose the "Show Outline" option when you go back to validate = you'll see why :)

Good Luck and Happy Ranking!