Module 3 - Optional Standards Task 2 - Validation

As I have used the W3C validator page before, I wanted to have another go so I took this newly created page and ran it through. Initially I got some ridiculously high number of errors because I got the DOCTYPE declaration wrong and even when I fixed that up still came back with over 50 errors! My choice of encoding (which I'm a bit fuzzy about) was UTF-8 which came back with a warning so I might avoid that one in future.

Over the next half an hour, I managed to fix them all up. Most were sloppy coding like missing semi-colons or finishing tags which interestingly didn't stop it displaying correctly by Firefox. So it would appear that most of the errors are just XHTML being pedantic. I have to say, it would be helpful if Notebook or some other text editor would tell you this as you go. Although some errors took longer than others to correct, I eventually I ended up with one of these:

I think this quality assurance in Web design is important however most sites already in the WWW would not be up to scratch and may never. Browsers still therefore have to support these so I wonder if this move to XHTML and CSS is going to be a very long road to consistent and flexible designed pages with features and characteristics that are supported by all browsers.