Rodent Regatta

Learning what’s behind the scenes of a web page has been an experience unlike any other educational endeavor I can recall. This morning, I get one of those seemingly small tidbits that is really a breakthrough.

Here’s the quote:

I missed one closing tag, and received 52 validation errors.

The enthusiasm of a beginning web designer getting her feet wet with XHTML rapidly wanes when this happens to her. Seeing so many errors on one page is a blow to ones psyche, and when they dont realize that all 52 can be eliminated with the addition of four bytes to their code, it can make the difference between sticking it out until validation is achieved, and turning their back on valid markup because its just too hard.

mezzoblue

* * * UPDATE * * * After wrestling with this very simple entry for over thirty minutes in Zempt, I went to Movable Type’s text entry screen to post this. No matter what I did to the text and links in the above entry, Zempt gave me an error when I attempted to post. Those are the kinds of things that shake a rookie’s confidence.

On second thought, surely I’m not still a rookie after making entries to a weblog for nineteen months. Does a day come when you really understand any of this junk? Can someone get confident with this stuff? Will an absorption of web standards make XHTML/CSS/HTML/templates/Movable Type/scripts, etc. more understandable?

* * * UPDATE 2 * * * I’m told by Zempt support that I had a ”high ASCII character in my post.” I’ve given it a couple of tranquilizers in hopes that it will come down soon!

Like a parent in denial, I can only say, ”I have no idea how it got high. All I did was copy it from mezzoblue’s weblog.”