The duplicate ID values for ‘email’ on that DIV won’t help you any regarding focusing on the form or it processing and you don’t seem to have an ID for ‘Mobile’ and ‘telephone’ looks wrong… Plus for some bizarre reason you have a nested FORM, somewhere you have gone seriously wrong with the copy-and-paste. Plus made bad choices with the DIV and their ID values (duplication of ID is illegal).
The FIELDSET and LEGEND is usually supposed to come directly after the start FORM tag and not after an erroneous DIV all your form is muddled up. Also double check your other Freedback variable values are correct first so shove it through the W3C Validator and try again…
Ah, but if you select the HTML option from the Syntax dropdown menu, it doesn’t warn you that it’s going to mark it up as HTML4 Strict. Very confusing for a newbie - and the rest of us. (:
To the OP, be warned that, although Ian Lloyd’s book is fantastic and I love it, it won’t guarantee a beautiful, fantastic website. There is still much more to design and development.
Mike wrapped the CODE block because it’s the closest to HTML with syntax highlighting available in the SPF vBulletin drop-down options the OP didn’t use any code wrap in the original post.
Thank you! I need to spend some time looking at this - it seems I have gone very badly wrong!! I will see if I can make amends - if not it may be worth starting the chapter again.
Thank you for your time
If you run your code through the W3C Validator periodically, it will help you pick up on errors as you go. Some of these may be as simple as typing mistakes, which can be really hard to find on your own. If you need help interpreting the Validator results, post back here and we’ll be glad to help.
I haven’t got to the validating section bit of the book yet - but I see it is in there and that is a good tip - thank you, I am sure I will need to use it a lot!
I took on board you advice and made some changes, re-read the chapter to ensure I had understood all the rules etc.
I then discovered that my CSS was interfering with the form. I don’t fully understand why. I have an email and tel number of the business on the web site with some CSS about where they should be positioned etc and these instructions were being applied to the email and tel number bits on my form. So I changed the div class names for the business email and telephone so the rules only applied to them and not my form. This worked and my form works. I has taken me ages but I got there.
PS - It is great there is a forum for us beginners with helpful and understanding advice. I guess some of you experienced programmers must bang your heads against the computer when you see the muddles we get in! So thanks for being so patient!
No, I don’t bang my head because we all have to start somewhere and I can vaguely remember in another life how hard it was leaning to create my first web pages, etc.
Though with a lot of practice it can get like riding a bike so I tend to guide more rather than just giving out copy-and-paste solutions so that it becomes a good learning experience and it sticks better in the memory.