My new EE-based website is now online at www.davidhewson.com Many thanks to all of you around here for your help and encouragement. Without it I would never have made it. I now intend to disappear to Rome for a week and look at the inevitable bugs later.
The one that really puzzles me is this. The site is three Blogs based on the same templates and CSS. I had a real job getting those two vertical rules around the content to appear in IE, Firefox and Safari and run all the way to the bottom of the page. They do on two Blogs. On the third, About, they stop at the content in FF and Safari. Beats me - it’s all the same code. But enough for now.

What I learnt from this exercise.
1. You really need to work out your structure well in advance.
2. WYSYWIG is a blind alley. I wasted almost two months trying to find some ‘easy’ way to do this with Freeway or some other WYSIWIG editor. In the end I just had to knuckle down and get to grips with the code. And it’s not as hard as you think (though I’m sure mine’s a mess).
3. When LisaJill tells you something she’s right, even if (no, especially if) you don’t want to hear it.

Ciao e grazie.

As for the column thing, you have some very strange validation errors.  I actually don’t think fixing those will fix the problem, but it IS possible.  Some of those errors could upset some browsers so I’d fix ‘em even if they don’t resolve the column issue.

As for 3.  LisaJill makes a lot of mistakes, and is scared of heights so disbelieves in pedestals.   

I’m happy you got it worked out, finally.  The site looks fantastic.

Yike… so many errors. Some of the unclosed statements were I know caused by me setting up a keyboard macro badly in the beginning. Also I used <I> for italic which seem to account for stacks too. Are you now supposed to use <em> or something?
But some seem to be output errors which are just beyond me. Is there some way in which it’s possible to reconcile a report like this with the output from a dynamic system? If it were a static page I can you’d just look at the code. But with EE…

<em> is better, but <i> would probably pass for transitional. I don’t remember offhand - capos definitely won’t though.

Look at the source, EE outputs xhtml transitional valid code, even strict 99% of the time, so you just need to view source (have the validator show the source) then compare and find which part of the template is outputting that, and fix it. =)

Capos??
It definitely doesn’t like <I> Also a lot of the errors seem to be me using css in an html area.

Caps, capitals, I just typod. =)

I don’t see any errors about css, you have things like <div align=left > that need to be <div align=“left”>, and that’s not valid strict either. =)

This validation stuff could drive you nuts. I had the devil of a time just getting the header logo to sit left in IE, Firefox and Safari. The only way I found to do it in IE was

<div align=left>
<img src=“http://www.davidhewson.com/res/default/newlogo.jpg” alt=“davidhewson.com” height=“100” width=“800” />
</div>

The validator says: an attribute value specification must be an attribute value literal unless SHORTTAG YES is specified. Nowhere I can find on Google is this explained? I just get lots of people experiencing the same incomprehensible error. And that was just number one…

> <div align=left>

You need to enclose the attribute values in quotes:  <div align=“left”>.  (The “align” attribute is deprecated, too, I think.)

Re: <i> vs. <em> (and <b> vs. <strong>)

All of those tags are perfectly valid to use.  However, <em> and <strong> have semantic meaning to them (emphasized text and strong text) whereas <i> and <b> are purely non-semantic and presentational.  So, if you have text and you’re italicizing or bolding it in order to emphasize it in some way then the correct/semantic thing would be to use <em> or <strong>.  Whew.  Make any sense?

Some generalized basics of XHTML first:

- With XHTML, all attribute values must be enclosed in single/double quotes (I personally prefer double-quotes, but it doesn’t really matter)
- in XHTML all tags must be lowercase (i.e. <div> not <DIV>)
- in XHTML all tag attributes must be lowercase (i.e. <div id=“bob”> not <div ID=“bob”>)
- tags need to be nested properly
- “block” level elements typically need to be included inside another block-level element and are not valid inside an inline-level element
- inline-level elements cannot contain block-level elements
- images require the alt=“text” attribute
- all tags must be closed, so tags that traditionally don’t have a closing pair can be implicitly closed: <img />, <input />, <br />, <link />, <meta />, etc.

A few specific comments from your validation:

- you put your header graphic inside the XHTML <head> area.  It needs to be inside the <body>
- Your <I> tags should be <i> (or <em>)

That info should cover the vast majority of your validation errors.  Hmm, think I’ll make a Knowledge-Blog entry about this…

Thanks. A lot of them are just down to bad practice which I can partly correct and keep corrected for the future (not closing tags, italics etc). Some just seem to come straight from the template (which I got at EE design, not through PMachine). For example it hates the uses of blockquotes in posts…

Line 413, column 11: document type does not allow element “blockquote” here; missing one of “object”, “applet”, “map”, “iframe”, “button”, “ins”, “del” start-tag
<blockquote><p>Once again capturing the imagination of historical mystery lovers
The mentioned element is not allowed to appear in the context in which you’ve placed it; the other mentioned elements are the only ones that are both allowed there and can contain the element mentioned.  This might mean that you need a containing element, or possibly that you’ve forgotten to close a previous element.
One possible cause for this message is that you have attempted to put a block-level element (such as “<p>” or “<table>”) inside an inline element (such as “<a>”, “<span>”, or “<font>”).
It whines similarly about posted and paginate and the side titles too. I’ve obviously fouled something up big time somewhere because the original template validates completely.

I registered at your site - your design reminds me of aldaily.com and I’m impressed that someone who can write a real book can also build a real web site - and got this screen message above the Thank You for registering:

Notice: Undefined index: screen_name in /home/username/public_html/system/modules/member/mod.member.php on line 3092

Thanks for passing on the error message - and the link to aldaily.com, which I hadn’t seen before. Will check out what the problem is. Most of the site is my own work but I confess I did get the services of an EE expert to check it out and tweak things once I was done—and a good idea it was too.