Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/12/07 20:15

On 12 Feb, 19:53, rem6...@yahoo.com (robert maas, see http://
tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> The URL for my Web page is:
> <http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/CookBook/CookTop.html>


> 1. Error Line 1353 column 14: end tag for "EM" omitted, but its
> declaration does not permit this.
> <em>(reduce #'/ nums :end 9)</em><br />

Congratulations! You might be one of the very few people to ever post
about validation problems here and to have actually exposed a real
flaw in the validator.

Your code is bogus, although probably not actually invalid. It's
littered with <p /> <br /> and <hr /> tags.

* This is HTML, not XHTML, so <br /> is wrong - just use <br>

* Your <p> elements aren't empty, so the empty tag <p /> is wrong.

* You appear to have confused <p> "paragraph wrapper element" with a
notion of it as "paragraph spacer tag". Replace [...] <p /> [...]
with <p>[...]</p> <p>[...]</p>

The try re-validating it.

It seems that the validator recently changed behaviours and started
accepting <br /> as valid HTML, when it used to reject it outright. I
haven't looked at the details, but there's a recent thread on it. This
is _strictly_ true, but horribly misleading to authors.

I neither know nor care whether this will cause the problem with <em>
that you're actually reporting. It's just not worth chasing these odd
ones until you've fixed the obvious stuff. One characteristic of
validators like this is that they usually report an error long after
the condition that really caused it.

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