Finding Errors in an (X)HTML layout painlessly!

One of the tough tasks for people that do not code HTML and CSS often is how to find the errors in their layouts. "Why is this not showing up?" or "Why is this red when it should be blue?" A lot of the time it is missing tags. A person forgets to close a span or paragraph tag. Another reason is nesting two elements together that should not be. Normally you would have to rip the code apart in chunks to find the problems, but there is another way to do this.

Well an easy way to find the errors is to validate your page. You can validate your page by going to W3C Markup Validation Service. Basically you either give the validator the URL to the site or up upload the HTML file. The validator runs through the page's mark-up and either says it found no errors or lists them out.

This validator should help you from banging your head against the wall, but it may cause you to bang your head if you do not understand the error messages! That is where the JavaScript HTML/JavaScript Forum comes in handy!

Eric Pascarello
Moderator of HTML/JavaScript at www.JavaRanch.com
Author of: JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Dynamic Web Pages