When the new DNN Creative skin appeared a couple months ago I was wow'ed by several things:

• The content at the top of the HTML - good for SEO
• The fact that it did validate both xhtml and CSS
• It looked good too

I have been working the information from the Issue 25 stripped down version of this skin into an xhtml / CSS skin.  I am finding some more DNN issues with validating:

• It appears that DNN is stuffing a align=center inside a when it puts a module on the page. I suspect that this comes from the module attribute setting of "Left Center Right" in the settings.

I just tried to re-validate DNN Creative's home page and it now fails. Mostly with
rather than
and a couple similar issues. The CSS validator timed out, so I wasn't able to try it.

Could we please get a list of what version of DNN you are running and what changes you had to make to DNN core to make the code compliant? 

I know that you tweaked Default.aspx, Link.aspx and Default.css as I have done. Since I mostly use the Text/Html module I am curious what changes you made to it, if any.

It appalls me to see the HTML code in some of these modules. I have one or two that I am going to drop from my system because of the and sloppy html that the use.  I don't know why today people aren't trying to write code that looks xhtml compliant even if the don't validate it. How hard can it be to use lowercase , use quotes and ending slashes?

The home page on DNN Creative was valid, but the  current validation errors are coming from the forum posts with break tags in capitals and also the subscription module has just been updated - which now also appears to include some invalid xhtml code.

I have been testing XHTML skins from version 4.4 to version 4.7 and they all work fine for validation. - DNN creative is still using 4.4 and so you can read these tutorials on how I got the site compliant:

• How to create an XHTML Compliant DotNetNuke 4.4
• XHTML Compliant DotNetNuke 4.4 and 4.5 - part 2

I do not recall seeing the align problem that you have - are you using a container? - if you tick in the module settings 'do not display container' you will get validation errors - so I always use a transparent container.

XHTML valid code is on the list for DotNetNuke version 5.

I am using the H1 container from your containers, because I wanted the Module Titles to have a built-in H1.

Are you really saying that I should not use the module title from the HTML module and have my first text line be a H1? I am also using some decoration from the container as well.

I am going to go back over your tutorials, becuase I think that I remember that you did tweak some DNN code to change a < span > to a < div > because it was illegal to have some other tage inside of a < span >

BTW, I am finding out that iehacks to seperate css for IE versions are more tricky in xhtml mode. I may have to go back to your JavaScript to call iehacks.css because finding a selector that works for IE7 in both quirks mode and xml mode is becoming problematic.

I try to watch your 4.4 tutorials today.  I am running 4.5.3 at the moment.

Regards,

DaveS

for the containers I am not saying that the first line of text should be a h1. - the container has h1 tags placed around the title token. - so any modules that you add to the page will automatically have a header tag placed around the module title.

The DNN code that you are referring to I think was for the text html module, in the later versions of DotNetNuke you do not need to make that change as it is already done for you.

I don't understand why you need to find hacks to work in both quirks mode and xhtml transitional mode. - for any CSS skins that you create they should be using XHTML transitional mode to ensure the best compatibility for the layout interpretation of your skin in a variety of browsers. - in the later versions of DotNetNuke you no longer need to set the Doc type by altering the code in the default.aspx file you set the Doc type by including a skinname.doctype.XML file within your skin files.

In one of the free skins that I have recently released there are some hacks which are targeting IE6 and IE7 separately. - I can't remember which skin it was off the top of my head but I have a feeling it was: FreeStyle

If you are using 4.5.3 you should only need to view the 4.5 version of the tutorials.

Hope this helps, thanks,