Originally Posted by dE.fUsEd
:eh: ampersand = "&", and it's not escaped? riiight. i'm using it
1 time, & it's in plain text format. lol
<b>, <i>, <u>, and <strike> are HTML standard and are
not going to ever be unsupported.
maybe you should use
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ to validate your shit. it can recognize that the only ampersand i have in the entire document, is in plain text.
ampersands in HTML plaintext should be escaped as
& (there are a couple other versions, too) - the reason is that the ampersand symbol itself is used as an escape character. for example, > is the greater than symbol, < is the less than symbol... there are a lot of special HTML characters, and they all depend on the ampersand. the unescaped ampersand issue is a warning, not an error. meaning that it's not absolutely 100% necessary to escape it in all circumstances. but if you don't do it, it
can lead to display problems (yep, it's happened to me before in IE). the only place you
shouldn't escape them is inside a preformatted text tag, text area/input tag, URL, or inside a tag attribute.
this is a decent list of special HTML characters and their corresponding escape sequences.
edit:
you should actually escape ampersands in URL's.
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/deprecated.html
Older HTML tags and attributes that have been superseded by other more functional or flexible alternatives (whether as HTML or as CSS ) are declared as deprecated in HTML4 by the W3C - the consortium that sets the HTML standards. Browsers should continue to support deprecated tags and attributes, but eventually these tags are likely to become obsolete and so future support cannot be guaranteed.
which means that no, you can't consider them as part of the HTML standard anymore. while browsers will
likely continue to support the old tags, this is in no way guaranteed. people will eventually drop them, so there's just no reason to keep using them. newer tags are more flexible and will be continually developed. CSS support will remain and grow, whereas with deprecated tags, CSS support will either drop entirely or remain where it is now. but if you want your HTML to be obsolete and don't want to take advantage of the new language specifications, suit yourself.
that HTML validator is not very good, and you probably shouldn't use it to validate your shit. i could immediately tell when it didn't say anything about the deprecated tags. there are plenty of free validator programs out there that offer much better results. i'm currently using one that's made as a firefox plugin, and it already beats the crap out of that one.
edit: after going through several other online HTML validators, i think the HTML validator you posted is alright. your site's main page IS valid HTML, but like i said, the ampersands and deprecated tags i mentioned were reported as warnings, not errors, using my validator. it's being more thorough, and telling you about things that others might not.
HTML4 is the last version of HTML that w3c will ever layout. the world is now adopting XHTML, and as it moves farther along, little things like what i've mentioned won't be tolerated anymore. as i've said before, better to learn things the right way first, rather than having to re-learn them later on.