$var wrote:whoa... so i checked the page on the validator, and i see so much that i need to know about.
Don't feel bad. The overwhelming majority of pages on the net do not validate yet, including yahoo, google, and so on. Becoming an expert means learning these little tricks of the trade, and knowing when to apply them.
$var wrote:i'm guessing the w3 org has a list on there somewhere of what all the DOC types are, because mine doesn't even validate.
They sure do! :
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html
$var wrote:how would the page read online, but not be a valid document?
Its an unfortunate thing. In the original first days of the web, there were few 'standards', and the technology was developing so fast that you couldn't really standardize a solution fast enough to meet the needs of users. Ten years later, and now its considerably more reasonable in pace.
Or put another way, the browser manufacturers started the game by supporting non-standard code, and now can't stop supporting it all of a sudden - customers would complain!
In theory, xhtml2 is supposed to stop that. Its supposed to be the clean slate where the legacy items are left behind, and non-valid code
will not be rendered.
Unfortunately, that draconian stance has resulted in xhtml2 being universally ignored. No one truly implements it according to the standard, and few plan to. Which in turn has led to the WHATWG team working on HTML5, which is html-4.1 with a number of interesting changes, but less brutal compliance requirements than xhtml2.
$var wrote:it's php, not xhtml... but even the pregenerated php DOCTYPE from Dreamweaver doesn't validate.
Remember, php is the processing language. Server-side. Its *output* can, and usually is, a variant of html. The two are related, and interact, but one is not the other.
You are talking about the output of your program, and getting THAT to be valid, not the php code.
