10 Common reasons why W3C validation fails

W3C validation is sometimes difficult to navigate, but you can use it to see errors caused by layout design. The validator throws up a lot of errors and warnings, indicating that your XHTML is not yet complete and may not function consistently across browsers. Here are ten subtle failure problems that have stumped legions of programmers, and we'll show you how to fix them.

This article begins with some considerations when using W3C validators.

Don't worry about the verifier's warnings - if the verifier says it found 12 errors and 83 warnings, ignore it and move on to the next step.

Correct One error at a time - Progress your work sequentially, from top to bottom, fixing one error at a time. HTML is viewed from top to bottom in a browser, and these errors are displayed in the same order.