W3C validation (Page 1 of 2)

Link? I might be able to help

Try closing the meta tag on line 4 properly i.e. put a space before the /
In fact, do the same for all the other self closing tags.

XHTML requires that tags either have closing tags or be self-closing: without the space I'm not sure if it's really self-closing.
But yeah, it does look like there's something funky with the Validator.

Yup, way too much useless non breaking spaces. These have very specific meaning, and should be use only when necessary (i.e. never for graphic or layout issue).

Have added spaces to all those tags, including <br />, (not updated the actual forum with the new code yet), so at least that part should be in spec now when I update the forum code. Cheers for the pointers from yourself and Paul.

I would have thought that padding and margins would be sufficient for most purposes. Failing that text-indent. I don't see why doing it via css is a problem, its much less work than having to alter the markup. For example, most of those non breaking spaces inside table cells are completely pointless. Use four lines of css to adjust the padding of table cells and you are done. If you want all the cells to have the same padding then only one line of css.

My apologies. Just looked at the source code again. Hadn't realised how much of the padding/indentation is done within tables. Would it then be a case of merely adding the text-indent line to the css for that particular table column, to get it all formatted and lined up correctly? I am no css expert, as you can probably tell, so my knowledge on the subject is somewhat limited.

Just one last question. What/where is use of the space character allowable/preferred, without things throwing a wobbler in future? i.e: is it okay to use two or three for spacing between text, or is that also borderline too? Is there a better way to achieve that effect too?

Thanks again.

Matt

All presentation needs to be done in CSS. Never in HTML.

That's quite a simple rule actually.

Strictly speaking   isn't valid xhtml. It only works because the browsers are error tolerant particularly when the page is not being served as xml. It should actually be  & # 160 ;

a {margin-right: 10px}

You should also put an ordinary space between them as well. If you want fine grained control of the spacing then float them left which will collapse the white space and make the margin setting completely accurate. You will of course have to add appropriate css to clear the floats to make the container shrink wrap the links.

Think I've almost got it. That piece of CSS is working a treat Paul. Thanks ever so much for that. Just in the process of modifying things at the moment, but everything appears fine upto just. Thanks again.

Actually, to be really strictly accurate, the situation with   is a bit more complicated. Its valid html and should be valid xhtml. If you are serving xhtml as html then there should be no problem. If you are serving xhtml as xml then the xml parser may well only allow the 5 named entities which are valid xml. The reason for the problem is that an xml parser trying to parse xhtml would have to query the xhtml doctype to ascertain what entites were defined there. If it doesn't do that then it will only regard the allowed xml entities as valid. Since the approach is different from browser to browser it is safer to treat xhtml as if it were xml and only use the 5 named entities permitted by xml which are <, >, &, " and &apos. It should however be noted that &apos; it not valid html.

MattF is probably partly right about the validator. They recently updated it so it could check documents served as xml and it probably needs some fine tuning.

The short answer is if you treat xhtml as if it were xml and use numeric references then you will never have a problem. The alternative is to use utf-8 and enter the real character.