Fixing problems
It's inevitable that things are going to go wrong with your web pages at some point. If you're new to HTML, it may seem like a daunting task finding out where the problem is so you can fix it. As if that weren't enough, the people who make web browsers thought they'd make things easier by letting some broken HTML through without telling you about it. That means you can be quite happily writing your pages and testing them in one browser, only to find out when you've finished that they don't work in any other browser.
Fortunately, there are some simple things you can do to avoid making mistakes, or to find them when things go wrong.
- Familiarise yourself with some common mistakes:
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerP3.html#TR - See where it goes wrong:
Remember that a web browser reads your page (and renders it on the screen) from the top to the bottom. So if your page looks fine up until that image you put in half way through and then it all goes horribly wrong, you can be pretty sure that there's something wrong with your image tag that's affecting the rest of the page. - Validate your HTML:
If you're using an HTML editor, it may well come with tools for checking your HTML. If not, the W3C (the people who decide what HTML should work and what shouldn't) created a program called HTML Tidy that can check your HTML files for errors. - Test your site:
The best way to find problems in your site (and to fix them before other people have to deal with them) is to test it thoroughly.
Common HTML errors:
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/...
HTML Tidy sites:
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#binaries
