legacyme3 :
the_casualty :
Lazlo Falconi :
JigSaw :

I had to code a page for my Programming class. I know the coding is good and my brother checked it and agreed. He has an Associate's Degree in Game Programming and already took the class I'm in. Yet she has a site that she has us use to check the code.

http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_upload

The site checks it as "XHTML 1.0 Strict." It rejected most of my tags and attributes. I don't get what I did wrong. I double checked with my professor. She said, "The reason that the validator picked your tags up as errors is because there are alternative "accepted" tags to what you have attempted to code onto your page."

So I decided I might as well ask if anyone here has any tips. I can PM my code to anyone who wants to help?

Yeah I'll help you. Likely if the problem is that it's running the test for XHTML STRICT and you used "alternative" tags, it's just a DTD error. PM me the code and I can probably help ya out.

As the name suggests, XHTML Strict is, well, strict. It's the old bitty English teacher of doctypes. Tons of properties are considered "deprecated" (font, center, among tons of others). Try running it under XHTML 1.0 Transitional and see if you get the same or similar results.

Running it through HTML Tidy would work swell too. It fixes up your pages to the "standards". That said, watch out, because if the code is in bad shape Tidy will appear to "alter" the page's layout in an attempt to make it standards compliant.

Also, do you mind putting the code of the page into Pastebin and posting it here so I among others can analyze it and attempt to fix it?

That is, unless Lazlo has already done the job for you.

the_casualty :

I PM'd the code to home, but haven't heard back. I'm on a school computer now, so I don't have access to my code.

We don't have an option of which form of code we get to run it through. She requires that we use Strict XHTML AND she checks it herself when we submit it.

Well, right off the bat I can tell you one thing. You're using HTML 4.0. XHTML Strict does NOT allow for the bgcolor attribute. Change your body tag to
[code]
...Actually, it would take far too long to go through this whole thing, but when you put it through the validator, doesn't it tell you what's wrong?

At first, I would say change your Doctype to HTML 4.0...but if you're not allowed to do that, I would guess you're supposed to be learning XHTML, but then, why hasn't your instructed taught you CSS? Something seems a bit odd here.

To be honest with you, I don't know why she would even have you use the STRICT dtd to begin with. It's awful. Nobody uses it, because it's just a pain in the zebra to code. If you want, I suppose I can go through and tell you how to alter everything from HTML to XHTML... But it would take a long, long time, and I think that may be the point of the exercise.

I'm sorry.

Lazlo Falconi :
the_casualty :

I actually already knocked out 27 of the 42 errors. 13 of them involved putting alt="blah blah blah" at the end of each of the images. The rest were basically saying that some tags couldn't be just floating around. They needed to be in some other tag. I put a div tag right after the body tag and that made all of those errors go away. Now I'm down to 15 and a bunch of them are based on attributes in the body tag.

Change them to CSS. w3schools has a bunch of good tutorials on CSS.

Thanks man. I'll be sure to check this site out as I've got just about no layout experience whatsoever.