huge fonts in IE (individual posts and sidebar)

Hi Lauren,

there are lots of validation issues on your site, not the least of which are things like rogue attributes.

alt=’Man says “there’s no tomorrow”‘ has three apostrophes in it, so the alt attribute actually ends after ‘there’ and before the ‘s’… these are things you have to worry about.

There are also loads of parsing errors, and before that there are opened div tags which never get closed, etc etc.

You might want to fix those with the help of a validator, one by one, unitl your site validates – then it’ll be much more obvious as to what the cause of your problem is.

http://validator.w3.org/

The errors look to be related to your posts, not the theme, so I think changing themes wouldn’t necessarily fix anything.

Of course, you could be lucky and change to a theme which isn’t as badly affected… but that doesn’t really solve anything.

if you plug your site into the validator, it’s looking at the same page your browser sees when you go there yourself.

You should look at the surrounding text in the errors it hands out, and fix them one by one, from the top down.

For instance, if it’s finding issues with your alt attributes, then edit whichever post of yours contains the image that’s referring to, and fix your alt attribute.

…. then run the validator again, and so on…

with that many validation problems this may take you a little while, but once it’s fixed it’ll be easier to maintain, and also MUCH easier to diagnose any weirdness.

If it’s the posts, I don’t get why the sidebar is affected…

The sidebar code typically comes AFTER all your post content, just that the layout instructions tell it to live side-by-side with the content.

That’s why if you have broken content, the sidebar will be affected (even seemingly above the point where your content is broken)

…

And I know the validator sees the same page I’m seeing, but I’m not sure exactly where that is. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, I know what you mean. The page you see when you visit your site in a browser is assembled with a rather complex series of actions performed by wordpress.

When you add content to your site, you’re adding it to a database, and to display that content the wordpress software then extracts it from the database, performs it’s magic, and stuffs it into whatever theme you happen to be using. All this happens behind the scenes to generate the ‘page’ you view when you hit your website.

The validator sees only the result of this process, not any “files” you may or may not have uploaded.

WordPress itself works, so you don’t need to worry about that. The only files you should be concerned with are those comprising the theme you’re using – and if the same issue happens when you change themes then you can likely ignore those too.

The rest is all in your posts, and those don’t exist anywhere outside the database.

By the way, while a five year old may look like they know more about your VCR than you do, they really have no idea how it works… and trying to explain it to a five year old would involve words like ‘magic’ 🙂

your <br> tags will generate validation errors, but they won’t cause all your problems (there are worse things in there somewhere).

You can continue to use manual breaks in your sidebar, but they should look like this:

<br />

XHTML requires that all tags be opened and closed, and this is their way of dealing with tags which don’t have partners. Images should also be terminated that way (in fact any tag which is not a pair, like <hr /> etc…)

…

Really, what you’re doing here is web design using a very complex PHP platform. If you were just blogging, all you’d be doing is putting text into posts, but here you are playing with your sidebar…

Blogging is easy, customisation is the hard part. 🙂

You’ll get there though… you just need to retain your patience and eat the elephant one bite at a time.

yes, your pages have the appropriate doctype declaration.

The validator (and other software which sees your page) uses this declaration to determine how to treat your website. It’s really a lot like putting “do not bend” on envelopes with photos in them.

Transitional is somewhat less restrictive than Strict, as the name suggests, which sounds like it might be best for your needs.

Every well-coded web document needs to have a DTD (=document type declaration) or doctype declaration at the very top.
Here is a list (just FYI) of different DTDs.
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

Now, the validator “looks” at your code and because the validation rules for different DTDs are different… it will check your site according the the existing DTD’s rules.

You don’t really need to know all this stuff… but since asked 🙂