W3C validation failed

On 11 Jul 2004 in macromedia.dreamweaver, lauralein wrote:

Thanks a thousand times! You were absolutely on target! I really
appreciate your help!
I can hardly believe that these 2 code errors were coming up as 74
errors before! Wow, what a difference some text -or lack thereof-
makes!

ISTR that the first complaint of the validator was "unclosed ...", and
once that happens, an error can just cascade right down the page from the
opening of the unclosed whatever to the end.

Do you have some advice on how to know what exactly one needs to
change if an error comes up? Is it in most cases that one needs to
delete the referenced code error? Is there some good documentation
somewhere to be found on how to interprete these messages?

Well, two things:
1) It's <ahem /> happened to me once or <koff /> twice before. You learn
to recognize the symptoms. Actually, you learn to avoid the symptoms.
One of DW's less desirable features is that when you add scripts
separately, it will sometimes get confused about where it's inserted
script tags and comment tags, and make a regular mess out of it, and it
needs to be cleaned up. This leads to a conclusion: externalize
javascript whenever you can. (You may detect a pattern here? See my
other posts...)
2) You were near the mark in your original post:

This is to all of you who are the real code writers:
Learn to read (and write) html, css, and if you're going to use it,

javascript. It requires a little time and effort, but it's not all that
hard, and it's worth it if you're going to be doing web development at
all. If you already know a bit, learn more. My favorite introductory
text is Elizabeth Castro, "HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and
CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, 5th Edition"
(http://peachpit.com/title/0321130073). It's not expensive (US$20 list)
and it's easy to digest. Standard disclaimer: I have no association with
author or publisher.

--
Joe Makowiec
http://makowiec.net/
Email: http://makowiec.net/email.php