General issues
If you have a problem that isn't covered below then complete the feedback form on the main website to report it. Don't forget to leave a valid email address where you can be contacted.
topHTML Results
Unlike many popular validation services (such as HTML Tidy) Total Validator uses the official W3C and ISO DTDs for HTML Validation and the tests are automated from these - in other words I haven't personally made up the validation rules or translated them. So if TV finds a problem on your page (or fails to find one) then it's highly likely that it's in the W3C DTD's and not a mistake in TV.
Many other validators do not use the official DTDs but are 'translations' of them. The most popular example is HTML Tidy. Because these do not use the official DTDs they tend to be rife with mistakes. HTML Tidy for example reports the 'type' attribute in the <link> element as being mandatory. This is wrong and doesn't even make sense.
However, the official DTD's cannot encode all the rules, because of the limitations of the DTD language. So I've added a number of additional tests to cover these limitations. So other validators that only use the official DTDs may miss errors that are there in the standards. For example the W3C validator doesn't check the value of attributes and so will report success even when your page has attributes with bad values.
So before you report that another validator says that your page is okay, or reports errors that Total Validator doesn't pick up, please check the actual standards first, don't just assume the other validator is right. Note that I wrote TV initially because of mistakes and limitations with 'popular' validators.
Accessibility results
Remember that the accessibility standards are guidelines and not rules. They can't possibly cover every situation and are there to guide you into making good decisions.
You need a human with their brain switched on to check a page for accessibility. Automated validators (even TV) can only guide you, but should never be regarded as a stamp of approval. Never let 0 errors be your only target. Bear in mind that it is quite easy to write a web page that passes all the tests of all the validators and yet would still trip up a screen reader and looks stupid to people with perfect vision.
So you should create your pages, manually ensure they meet your accessibility requirements and only then use Total Validator to check for anything you may have missed
With TV I've tried to follow the spirit and meaning of the WAI and Section 508 guidelines, rather than blindly coding rules. So you may find 'errors' picked up by other validators that simply don't appear in our results. Before you put pen to paper to berate us check out the guidelines themselves first as these 'errors' are probably wrong.
Some specific things of note:
- User-agents are much better than they were when the WAI guidelines were first conceived. As a result many guidelines are now redundant. For example there is no longer a requirement to put place holding text in edit boxes and text areas. This was 10.4 of WAI 1.0 (AAA). Similarly 1.5 of WAI 1.0 (AAA) is no longer required.
Screenshots
With IE 6 screenshots you may get a 'Press OK to continue' popup on the screen. This is due to a lawsuit brought by Eolas against Microsoft which caused them to modify IE6 to display this popup. You should consider modifying your web page to avoid this issue. See this Wikipedia article for more information including solutions.