Head First HTML with CSS

See, piece of cake.
The DOCTYPE is in our
pages and working fine.
standards, compliance, and all that jazz
Jim: Yeah, really easy. But here’s what I still don’t get: we put this
DOCTYPE at the top of our file to tell the browser our page is HTML 4.01
but that doesn’t ensure that the file really is HTML 4.01. We could have
made a mistake. So what’s the point?
Frank: You’re right, because your promise to the browser is only good if
you actually have written perfect HTML 4.01. That’s what I was going to
get to next. What we can do is make use of a free online service that can
look at a page and tell us if it’s compliant.
Jim: Really? How does that work?
Frank: Well, this service first looks at the document type and then checks
all your HTML and makes sure it’s actually correct... like checking to make
sure you’re spelling your tag names right, your elements are nested properly,
that your inline elements are inside block elements and so on. It’s called a
validator.
Jim: Wow, and this is free? Who provides this service?
Frank: The guys who came up with the standards. They’re called the
World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short.
Jim: This sounds like the answer to writing compliant HTML. But how do
I know all those things you just mentioned, like what elements go inside what
elements?
Frank: Let’s check out the validator first and then we’ll come back to that...
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