Here's what W3 says on the subject: http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html

Personally, I'm not totally convinced that validating is that big of a deal; it's certainly a good gauge of how your site may perform in a multi browser environment, but if your HTML doesn't validate, and you're happy with the way your site is being rendered in all of your test cases, then it's probably ok.

All that being said, if a validator isn't recognizing your doctype, I'd think that's an indication that your site has a good chance of not rendering properly in some browsers...I'd double check your doctype against this chart: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

I'm very big on valid coding myself but always feel that if your happy with your web sites errors and warnings then don't worry. However, if it didn't recognise your DOCTYPE then chances are that browsers might not and then place your website into "Quirks Mode" which is not a good thing. Its bad for displaying your site and also SEO can be effected. To be honest why don't you just copy/paste your code in a direct input? If the html document isn't working try that. It might just be a bug. What DOCTYPE are you using by the way? Some DOCTYPES aren't used anymore if its that old, theres a simple answer to that, change your DOCTYPE to a valid one then re-submit your file for validation. However it may cause more errors and warnings.

Goodluck...!

Hi
I am using Expression Web 2 and need to alter an existing website so as to display nicely on what I regard as a standard display size of 1024 x 768. It would have been better to start from scratch but it's a bit late for that now. I have an error "td tag not closed before this body tag closed". I couldn't find any open tags and decided to sumbit the page to the HTML validator. To cut a long story short it didn't accept the Doctype statement throwing 9 errors.

Just out of curiousity I decided to enter www.microsoft.com into the validator. Is this a record? The validator threw up 296 errors and 31 warnings!

Microsoft seem to be doing all right so why bother should we bother with the HTML validator?

Geoff

The HTML online validator can't tell where the arror ocurred exactly. Tries to narrow the posibility by selecting the first element the error triggered and the last one suffering it. In this case, the closing tag of the body element. This means that the error has safetly passed from element to another without causing a chain error reaction until it reached the end of the document. Therefore logically you should look from the head-tail direction to try and trace it. In fact it is most probably nothing, not even a missing closing tag, It migt be some mismatched quote or accidentaly deleted or forgoten qoute in some value most probably at that td element or right after it for that matter.
To some extend W3C validator is good for detecting malformed markup in time and before you've started messing up the styles to correct things that otherwise would not need fix, and which by the time you've corrected display forcedy in one browser it might just totally break it on the other because of different error recovery methods used by another and so on...

The only thing that matters is an answer to the question: does the page layout render properly and as intended on at least 3 major browers, or not? The other part is easy tweaks and commodity. Nothing else matters. Since W3C is not a browser, and w3c is not going to render those pages to you clients. A real life browsers are going to do that. They are the only standards a professional coder should follow. Since your client is not going to ask: "does your code validate at W3Cs", but "why is this table rendering halfway out of the window?!!" And believe me, I've seen so many pages passing validation completely, but rendering as an accident bare survivors.

Regards