New Skin Validation Challenges

A new skin was added to the site, in hopes to make the Tablet PC Questions site more attractive. Yet, the validation is showing over 123 errors. Can someone help me with this problem? Editing the template files is giving me a headache.

Is this posted in the correct forum? I am thinking this causes a problem with SEO, too?

*moving to the template forum*

as for your errors, it looks like you need to learn xhtml over html, as that is 90% of your errors.

background doesn't exist. change it to
style="background: url(path/image.jpg) no-repeat;"

img tags must be closed ie, <img src="" />

same deal with <br>.... needs to be <br />

alt="" or alt="something" needs to be on all images.

width doesn't exist either... 100% is default width on block-level elements. on tables, you need to specifiy it.. style="width:100%;"

border, change to style="border 1px solid #000000;"

cellpadding and cellspacing, change to margins and padding and collapse the borders

<table style="margin: 3px; padding: 3px; border-collapse: collapse;">

with is a typo for width, and you still need to pull that out in favor of a style

errors 70 and 71, you have invalid nesting. you're closing a table cell which was never opened.

you also have a lot of
<table><td>
missing the opener tr

error 112, you have a weird character in there. you should use the ascii of html replacememnt for it, like &copy; for a copyright for example. i'm not sure what the actual character is by looking at it.


you also need to close your table cells properly.

<tr><td><div>fsdfsdd</div></tr> is missing the closing td. it is required.

error 179, nowrap is the killer. all tags like this need to equal themselves in xhmtl.

nowrap="nowrap"

same for stuff like selected on select options, selected="selected" and checked="checked"


that should fix the majority of your errors.

if you paid for this skin, please post where you got it so no one else gets dupped into buying from someone who doesn't know wtf they are doing.
there's a ton of errors in this thing, and frankly, i'd re-do the whole thing.

:::vBSkinworks - Custom vBulletin Skins:::

nuff said.

Originally Posted by briansol

:::vBSkinworks - Custom vBulletin Skins:::

nuff said.

Yes, this is not my skin and the validation is a mess. The Google bots have arrived much less often since moving to this skin - to the tune of 25% of the bots prior to the change over.

I'll see what is happening one line at a time but do not know which templates .. so I guess I'll just pick through them

THANK YOU - for the help. I was able to find the major problem with the closed tag ... the skin had the tr and td reversed at the end of the forum post bit.

There are still 18 to go but I wanted to post my thanks because this would not have been possible without such a detailed explanation.

To get the image in the td tag I used
style="background-image:url()"

Closing the image tags was fairly easy with a search on img within textpad. I just was not sure of the templates to modify.

I'll keep going

looks like you got them all worked out


Now, to take it a step further....


pull all those inline style="" attributes out, and replace with a class or id, and use put the appropriate info in the stylesheet extra area at the bottom.

so instead of

<table style="margin:2px; padding: 2px; border: 1px solid #000; border-collapse: collapse;">

try:

<table class="normalpad">

and put:

table.normalpad {
margin:2px;
padding: 2px;
border: 1px solid #000;
border-collapse: collapse;
}

into your stylesheet.

also, change your stylesheet to use files (in the vboptions) and make sure your folder as indicated is 777.

this will help greatly with the code to content ratio

Great ideas. I will work on the site next weekend. IRL work this week will keep me busy ...