I know it is stupid that I haven't tried it before, but validating with the w3c has made my pages look better in netscape and opera! Well, actually worse in opera, which is why I'm posting. The page in question is: http://greatwhite.no-ip.com/wtp/ Keep in mind there is no content on the page. I need to get a good design before I start plugging things in. It looks great in IE, okay in mozilla and netscape 7, but netscape 4.8 and Opera get a little confused with things. What am I doing wrong? I don't want a left or top margin for the body, but when I put in the CSS for it, the W3C gets mad at me and won't validate it... When I'm invalid it looks fine in opera, but I want valid and looking good! My main body also reaches over to the right edge of the screen in mozilla and netscape 7. (it goes off the screen in netscape 4.8) Should I get away from using width=100% and start using something else? My images also all have margins around them in netscape 4.8, so it looks like my menu exploded. I know the actual links won't look great, but at least they will function and the background will look nice if I can fix it. I know netscape 4.8 validation may not be neccessary, but I want to be as versitile as possible. I'm not trying to reach the IE crowd, I'm trying to reach everybody, and learn good, clean coding. (I know I need to comment my code, but that is what I'll be doing tomorrow!) Any advice?
I gave up on W3C, my pages will generally fail because of: leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" in the body tag, the rest of the page can be OK, but it still fails. I too tried redefining the body tag with CSS to give no border around the page, the page passed the W3C validator test, but didn't render correctly in early versions of Netscape. I've tested the pages with the leftmargin etc. attributes that cause them to fail the W3C test and they will render just fine in IE 4+ Netscape 4+ and Opera. In the end I decided to develop my pages to work in the real world and not to please a validator. Joe surfer won't give a damn wether your pages are W3C compliant or not, but he might notice if things don't look right.
The Validator does seem over-fussy, I got failures because H1-5 don't specify a background color (it's specified in Body).
Yeah I think it wants a background: transparent (or inherit) It's annoying, but I guess it isn't so bad to be thorough. (although it does seem a bit wastefull of space)