I keep on struggling building my pages with Freeway while using Expression Engine.
My question:
Must I worry about the errors that appear in the Validation report? The pages show quite good in my browsers. How important is this Validator really?
To me the errors are gibberish, do not know how to eleminate the problem. I guess it takes quite some years of study.
Errors like:
‘end tag for “p” omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.’
or:
‘document type does not allow element “div” here; missing one of “object”, “applet”, “map”, “iframe”, “button”, “ins”, “del” start-tag .’
After the blurb told me that FWP5 out puts clean code I was also shocked to find that the W3C validator found many issues with my site even though I did nothing out of the ordinary with it. Not so clean output after all.
Sometime around 14/9/08 (at 18:39 -0400) Lee Foster said:
After the blurb told me that FWP5 out puts clean code I was also
shocked to find that the W3C validator found many issues with my site
Care to share a URL? In my experience, the only way you’ll get
non-validating code is if you use third-party Actions in
inappropriate HTML output versions, or if you add custom markup from
elsewhere, again formed inappropriately.
Seriously, what’s the URL? Let people help get to the bottom of this.
Things can be fixed up on your site Lee. I see a blank META tag with content errors that take up 2 of the errors (just delete the blank one in your META tag options under “Page”) and the rest look like they have to do with the roll-over scheme at the top with your navigation.
You could fix up those errors by using the CSS Menu action and still get those background image roll-overs.
Not being critical, it’s just examining the errors in the validation process helps figure out what’s making things invalid.
Otherwise, cool looking site. I always thought Casper was real too. Crazy.
It seems the navigation at the top of the page contains a bunch of
nested link tags, which aren’t valid. How did you make them? If it’s
all Freeway generated stuff then could you send your file into
support(a)softpress.com please.
Many thanks,
Joe
On 15 Sep 2008, at 09:22, Dan J wrote:
Things can be fixed up on your site Lee. I see a blank META tag
with content errors that take up 2 of the errors (just delete the
blank one in your META tag options under “Page”) and the rest look
like they have to do with the roll-over scheme at the top with your
navigation.
You could fix up those errors by using the CSS Menu action and still
get those background image roll-overs.
Not being critical, it’s just examining the errors in the validation
process helps figure out what’s making things invalid.
Otherwise, cool looking site. I always thought Casper was real
too. Crazy.
(closing P tag with no opening tag before it. You have
a DIV inside a P, also invalid. Freeway won’t output things like this
so it must be EE or an Action.
Maybe Joe M or others versed in EE can help out here?
Joe
On 15 Sep 2008, at 17:11, atelier wrote:
My topic seemed to be going into a direction which has not so much
to do with my pages…
As aid, I work with a combination of FW and Expression Engine.
Site can be found here:
Must I worry about the errors that appear in the Validation report? The pages show quite good in my browsers. How important is this Validator really?
This was the original question, and a good one. Does the Validation report have a bearing on search engine rank or indexing, assuming errors are minor?
The entire point of validation is this: there are browsers, and then there are standards.
Standards are much pickier than browsers, but no two browsers will display a broken page the same way. Some will fall over and die, and fail to show anything; some will do an excellent job of paving over the problem, and you won’t ever notice it. But you can’t know, in advance, what browser will be used to see your page, and you can’t know what other factors might contribute to your page not displaying the way you intended it.
So it’s always best to err on the side of the angels.
If your page validates, that means there’s one less reason why some other feature of your site doesn’t work for someone somewhere.
Furthermore, standards change at the speed of continental drift. Browsers change like the coastline of Greenland. But all of the major browsers aim toward the standards. So by making your site standards-compliant, you are dramatically improving your chances of having a good user experience WITHOUT having to make seven different versions of your site and using browser sniffing to redirect your visitors to something that might work. (Bad 90’s!! No cookie for you!)
Now I must solve my minor problem here, why some pages do not pass. I’m afraid I’ll have to open another topic for that. I discovered that a page with a single entree does validate, but the pages with a selection of entrees do not. Ergo, it’s not the combination of FW and EE. Which is good news.
Even better news. In the meanwhile I examined the difference between the output from FW and the HTML in the browser and found that the pagination code gets moved (!) by Expression Engine. But the formatting code, correctly inserted by FW, stayed behind on the page -obviously-. Hence the 7 mistakes. P tags on places where they never should be, etc.
Solution: I wrapped the paginationcode inside a mark-up element, and added by hand the opening and closing tags for the correct formatting. And presto, gone were the errors. Page gets validated.
Thank you all for making me look after this mistake myself. Learn more every day…
One other place to look, particularly if you have pages that get built inside a loop (execute this template N times), is duplicate ids. I have an Action called Anonymous which will strip out IDs from Freeway-generated templates, and I believe that Joe Muscara has a similar feature in his Actions for EE.
