Now I’m near to completing the new theme I”ve started to run it through the HTML and CSS validation tools provided by W3C on there sight. And after and initial tweak everything is back on standard.

There where a few areas that caused problems.

First I had used a few colour names in the style sheet. These seem work on all the browers I have on my machine but they were non standard and so i ditched them. Here is a handy lookup of the named colours and the colour code.

Second was the fact I’ve used a nice little element to do round corners, This is non standard and only available on Mozilla based browsers , but I’ll keep it as an option that can be enabled, so I can have the best of both world, nice style and compatabilty.

Third and final was totally out of my control and really it won’t stop the themes passing the tests. Testing the theme on my sights I discovered that both Amazon afiliate ads and Google adsense both produce code that is no HTML compliant.

I’ve set my target for the theme so i don’t keep tweaking for ever, so I’m hoping to post the new theme soon.

I’ve recently been resigning my theme for WordPress and its been a little slow going. I’m not a designer but i can work out what looks okay after a few attempt, but the problem is in the subtle differences in the way pages render across browsers. Now all browsers adhere to some version of the w3c standard, but it would appear that there are a few cracks in the standard that allow sightly different interpretations of how things should be done. The one that I have been having problems with is the liststyle.

Here is a useful article that explains the problem and having a little better understanding helped me solve my problem.