[oclug][OT] Validation

[Rod Giffin]

On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 15:54, Shad Young wrote:
> Rod's advice was to validate the pages to see of there were errors. The
> CSS validates with the one warning "TD: no background color defined" -
> no big deal (and messes up the site) and I am still allowed to display
> the "CSS validates" icon (YEAH!). I know I will need to make classes for
> the td's as well, if I want to validate perfectly.

This is only partly why I asked you to validate the tags.  I asked you
because the HTML source was so full of extraneous white space that I was
having a bit of a hard time reading the raw html file.  Validating
software doesn't care about the white space... but unfortunately my eyes
do.

It was also missing the charset declaration, which is a required element
in HTML 4.0 transitional, but that shouldn't affect rendering.  If you
want to fix that, there are a number of options.  You might have a
problem if you ever develop multi-lingual sites though.  Usually that's
the only time this becomes an issue.
 
> The other is the original designer made some lists with <li> only, with
> out the <ul>. Adding the UL indents the list and causes its formatted
> box to get real ugly. How do I get around this?

CSS.  You can specify a lot of things in CSS, including pixel by pixel
control of positioning elements in things like lists and tables.  There
are some major differences between older and newer versions of the same
browsers as well as between browsers of different manufacturer.  CSS
serves to allow for the overriding of a browser's default interpreter
settings, and gives the website developer a tool to control the
appearance and positioning of elements.  It is not a panacea though for
browser inadequacies, it's just a tool that helps.

Rod.