Right – that’s a standard HTML page. You did a bangup job of getting it to validate.
However, WordPress is PHP driven. And somewhere, somehow, you’ve removed much of the critical information from your WordPress based pages.
As it says in the validator:
“The DOCTYPE Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation has been performed using a default “fallback” Document Type Definition that closely resembles “HTML 4.01 Transitional”, but the document will not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the DOCTYPE Declaration.
You should place a DOCTYPE declaration as the very first thing in your HTML document. For example, for a typical XHTML 1.0 document:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- ... body of document ... -->
</body>
</html>
(Note: I don’t think HTML Strict is the way for you to go – you should validate transitional. But the above is what appears on the validation site as an example. Using that might be what borked your sidebar. You need to use the proper DOCTYPE for what your site’s limits are… )
So this is all MISSING from your header.php file.
I did say that I wasn’t sure if it were dreamweaver/fireworks or if it were because you changed wordpress core elements without knowing.
The majority of my comments related to your sidebar are simply because I don’t find it visually appealing – and you had said “I hope you like the design.” which led me to believe you were looking for feedback on it. I don’t think the sidebar should look the way it does, nor do I feel that javascript is necessary. That said, it’s YOUR site, and you’re perfectly entitled to do whatever you want – I’m just giving the feedback/opinion it appeared that you were looking for.
You said, “I tried to put in the doctype line, but the Mozilla Browser did not like that code at all. Rendered the Firworks menu wrong. It started to add in a whole lot of white space between menu choices.”
I don’t know where you tried to put it, or what exactly you tried to put where – but there are a lot more reasons why your elements (like the sidebar and other things) would render incorrectly – about two dozen or so reasons.
I’m not trying to be anything other than helpful here, so if you’re reading it otherwise, please don’t. If you don’t care about how things look right now, or if it validates, or if it shows up properly or at all in anyone else’s browser but your own – that’s completely your choice. I’m just trying to respond to your first query and help you out with the problems you have, that you didn’t even know about…
That said, until you come back and specificially ASK for help with any given thing/s – I’m probably not going to offer further direction, because I fear you’re getting a little defensive, as though maybe I’ve helped where you didn’t want it or something. A few of us have mentioned that fixing ALL those validation errors will likely fix ALL your browser compatibility issues – where you take it from there is up to you.
Best of luck and success with the site! 🙂
