Compliant or not Compliant

What exactly do you mean? You can't see the tags and stuff we've highlighted in posts? They are all there it's just they are deep in the source.

If you mean you can't see any code on the normal view of the site well that is because it isn't there - the code is all the source.

Ohhh! Did mean that you seen tags that really are not supposed to be there in the source, not on the actual site. I thought you actually meant you see these tags in the normal view of the site.

It is possible to make these tags be seen in the "normal view of the site" but in most cases you have no need to do that.

Can anyone recomment any freeware (or unrestricted trial) tool's that would allow me to check my site (and yes i know bits look daft in MSIE6 - the next job is to get it working with that!).

At work, my collegues who design the company's website that client access on a daily basis have the fun job of getting everything to work across IE6,5,4 and 5.2 for Mac, Netscape 4.62 and 4.74(i think), and Netscape 7.

This is a lot harder than it lookss, and trying to get companies (our clients) to upgrade their own crippled implementations of IE4 is nearly impossible.

If you want a tool to check if it's valid then use http://validator.w3.org

If you are talking about how it looks well this is part of the advantage of using clean standards compliant code. If you stop thinking of a website as a website and think of it as a structured document to be descorated then you can have far more sucess.

I can't stand the misguided idea of backward compatibilty myself. Once again I highlight http://www.alistapart.com/stories/tohell/ . If you use all the heading tags and CSS properly you can have all the content display everywhere (including phones and stuff) abeit very plain looking.

As you are catering for businesses and theit annoying habit of stadardising on IE4 however I suppose backwards compatibilty does have to be thought of.

Now as for checking the site's look there is a website called Browser Cam www.browsercam.com which gives you print screens of your site in loads of browsers and OSs It has a 7 hour trial then it's about $10 a shot.

There is also a little tool called HTML Tidy made by W3C that cleans up garbelled HTML although it's hardly user friendly and has the ability to knack everything. Get it from http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ but read
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/betterliving/ first. It's got a section about using that tool.

If you have Dreamweaver MX at your disposal you can use that to check what things are *supported* in different broswers by using File, Check Page, Check Target Browsers although this won't show you how it looks.

Now ironicly enough I was resetting my old PC the other day and looked at my altered TV Room homepage in IE4 and it looked identical to it's look in IE6 and Mozilla. What I can see is that by using simple CSS and clean markup you should be able to cater for lots of browsers and retian a similar look, across browsers.

I gave up with that as it was stupidly slow, but i've been using http://valet.webthing.com/view=Asis/page/

My sins are
1. forgetting the doc type (all page < 2 months old have this)
2. forgetting ALT tags (with capture's they arn't that useful though)
3. forgetting the type="text/javascript" on JavaScript Stuff
and the most annoying one of all, is that php / asp links like

somesite.somdomain/somepage.php?page=front&subpage=1

don't work, you've to change the & to & amp ; (sans-spaces).

I'm slowly getting their (Freeview, DAB and AV Gear are fine )

OpenOffice and MS Office have an annoying habit of inventing attributes too, which are hard to get rid off (why can't dreamweaver 4 place excel tables with borders!).

My next site re-design will be using css for positioning rather than tables, that should be a fun task!

Thanks for the help with the flash code in my html, I've now updated it with the code you suggested. Do you have a logo you would like included on the credits page, or a link?

ah yes. Much nicer - it works in Mozilla now.
Two little things though. Add a Doctype to your code. I'd advise
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
as adding the URL version would put Mozilla and IE into Standards mode which would mean the whole thing collapsing.

Now looking very carefully at the new results it's actually pretty clean. There are 154 errors but most of them are not real ones. Nearly all of them are caused by the validator having diffculty with Javascript. (I'm not keen on that scroller anyways - ghastly).

Infact if you edit out that section then it comes down to 21. 7 of which are caused by the new flash code and 6 are caused by PHP style links with & in the code.

Final few things I'd recommend.
1 - Down in the javascipt there is the the tag </colour> - now not only is this the wrong spelling but you should be closing </font>. Plus as for message number 4 - tut tut tut.
2 - where it says
<script language="JavaScript1.2">
replace it with
<script type="text/javascipt">

and that's it. As for an image - I'll find something
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Kev - I think the problem with all the web based checkers is they all bring up complex explanations for the bugs. Dreamweaver gives much easier to understand things. I suppose the different validators are a matter of taste.

Does replacing the & signs in links work? I would have though it would mean a link like /somepage.php?page=front&amp;subpage=1 . I usually just ignore things like that. There is a little thing on my homepage pointing out that it won't validate because the validator can't undestand HTML things in javascipt properly.

Yep, as & amp ; is meant to be rendered as a & it works fine, just annoying when copying and pasting

Dreamweaver hates my Frameset, as the righthand page is generated via php, depending on wheather a $contentPage value was passed (if you try and view any of my pages individually you'll notice they pop in the frameset - just have to get the menus to open to the correct place )

I don't use frames myself so I don't know how to fix things but maybe replacing

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
with
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

might help.


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I notice the TV Room has now removed that useless CSS from the top of the page. I'm still waiting for comment on that updated version BTW.
http://www.hymagumba.freeserve.co.uk/uploads/the-tv-room.shtml
The original from back then
http://www.hymagumba.freeserve.co.uk/uploads/the-tv-room-original.shtml

Have done - dreamweaver still dislikes it, but validates better, except border="0" is an illegal tag

There's a good forum thread over @ the MozillaZine forums that explains why it is important to follow
recommended web standards when writing webpages, rather than use proprietary, IE specific code:

MozillaZine Forums - Mozilla General - Should all websites support Mozilla?

The first poster asks if it's really worth supporting "minority browsers" like Mozilla and Opera, but
a contributor on the second page of the thread (Paul) gives a good and lengthy explanation why
using web standards is so important, and why those still using IE specific code, will eventually
have to rewrite all their webpages to comply with internationally recognized open standards.