Validate Me Please!

*WARNING: This entry is extremely dorky, please be careful.*
Well, after reading “Designing with Web Standards”:http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/ by “Jeffery Zeldman,”:http://www.zeldman.com/ I have finally updated my HTML(Hyper Text Markup Language) and Stylesheet to be fully compliant with the “World Wide Web Consortium.”:http://www.w3.org/ To the untechnical this is the equivalent to assembling an IKEA table, finding out you have one screw left and even though completely sturdy, you disassemble the table, just in case it wasn’t extra.

I first updated my HTML (while listening to an episode of “This American Life”:http://www.thislife.org/ about “Camp”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/109.ram)… After a few tweaks it validated. Much easier than I thought… Although, I thought it was _valid_ when I wrote it, but that’s my problem.

Because of my fantastic ability to follow direction and conform, I got a chunk of code to prove to the world that I am a conformist.

This equals this…

So, being the conformist I am, I decided to snap my CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) into being valid as well. This, to the non-technical, is equivalent to removing the wallpaper to see if it is securely fastened and then sticking it back up. Sounds easy right? In the technical world it is.

*Cha-Ching!*

Now that I had tasted the pleasure of _validation,_ I needed to post yet another little image saying so.

So, where’s the point of this story, you might be asking yourself, well here it is. This organization that prides itself on *standards* and rating my ability to follow them, well their code that they gave me to post on my site…

Is NOT valid under their specifications. It’s kind of like building an IKEA table and a technician from IKEA comes over to your house and takes apart that table and walks out with the screw.

*Well it isn’t really, but who’s counting.*

The correct code would look more like this:

See that little

/>

at the end of the Image tag? It makes all the difference in the world. _Wait until Zeldman hears about this._