Validating your new or updated page

If your pages and/or your menus etc start looking funny with strange formatting etc, there is a good chance that you have some invalid html. This can happen if you keep changing the formatting - the rich editor can get confused with too many attempts at formatting. Typical problems are:

  • unclosed tags. eg: a section starts with h5 and then you never closed it.
  • overlapping tags.
  • and so on

To check a page, browse to the page via the normal access to your web. Save the URL in the address bar. (select it, then press control-C). In another tab or window, open up

http://validator.w3.org

Paste (control-v) the URL of your page into the appropriate form field in the validator page and click “check”. If your html is all valid, you should get no errors.

To fix, you should go to the raw html and check that there are matched tags around bits of text. If this is too hard, cut and paste your text (as it appears in normal web view and not the editor), into Notepad (this will get rid of any html). Then select and cut and paste back into the editor window and then carefully reapply your formatting (headers, emphasis etc).

Note: some errors may be caused by the theme that you using if it was not properly validated - hopefully not! But at least some others may highlight some problems in your html.