Boot Camp

appendix 2
Problem-Solving Tips
Problem-Solving
My Code Doesn’t Work!
When you are learning to code, you’ll have a lot of situations where your code just
doesn’t work. Things look wrong, or don’t validate, or look significantly different on different
browsers.
Most of the time it’s because of simple things that break your code’s ability to work, especially
depending on which doctype you chose. Here are a few things to keep an eye out for:
Placement
• Your web page must have open and closed html tags surrounding the head and
body.
• Your head tags must open and close before you open the body tags:
• NO tables, text tags, styles, etc. ever go inside the head section of your website.
• All your text, image, link, and styling tags need to be in the body of your web
page
Validation Hint: If your page has several dozen errors, you likely have a problem with
your doctype, opening html tag, and/or metatags.
Tags
• Make sure you have open and closing tags for tags that wrap around something:
Ex. text here
• Make sure your closing tag has a slash in it: Ex.
• Make sure you open and close the same tags:
• NO
• YES
• Check that you did stand-alone tags right: , ,
Validation hint: If you get an error mentioning some part of the , , and like tags,
look at both the line the error has hit on AND the lines above it. Often you will find you
forgot to close another tag set, like ending a table row before starting a new table row.
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