Entry Text Keeps Getting Smaller

By the way, the page.php template you post above seems to be fine from a cursory glance. The main post DIV is closed, and there are no <p><small> tags at all. So it’s either being generated by another template in your heirarchy, or it has to do with cutting and pasting from another source (e.g. MS Word) that is bringing in extraneous codes.

I’m thinking, though, it’s probably a different template, rather than a cutting-and-pasting issue — the <p><small> tags occur OUTSIDE of the entry DIV, which contains your input from the WP Admin editor.

I replicated the issue in Chrome – but with all problems like this it is usually caused by a missing end tag – in this case it is specifically the </small> that is missing.

A validator is you friend.

54 Errors and 10 Warnings

When you build a theme, you should check as you go with the validator. Elfin was kind enough to go through your code, but most who see the 54 errors will not bother.

Thanks guys, I fixed the problem. It was indeed the unclosed small tags. The page has lots of errors, but I’m unsure as to how to fix them? Will the errors listed in the checker cause any severe problems?

Validation is a useful tool — invalid code may break the site in some browsers (so you need to test at least in the big 4 browsers currently in use: IE6 and IE7, Firefox and Safari), and may also cause issues for non-human readers (search engines, text readers for the visually impaired, etc.). Validity also helps ensure that your site will probably work in new versions of browsers as they come out in the future. You should therefore try to make your site as valid as you possibly can.

That said, it’s worth learning which errors are minor and which are really important.

Things like failing to provide “alt” text for your images are fairly minor — although conforming to this rule helps search engines and people who suppress images when surfing (low bandwidth, visually impaired, etc.).

Things like failing to close tags, having invalidly nested code, or using deprecated tags are major and may cause your site to break in some browsers, or in future browsers. You should definitely fix those.

(Others will disagree with me here and say that you should always make sure that your site has perfectly valid code.)

If you’re going to be working on your own site, you will save a lot of headaches by learning basic HTML (fairly easy) and CSS (harder — especially “positioning”, i.e. layout).

There are lots and lots of HTML/XHTML guides online — just make sure that your guide is fairly recent, because HTML has evolved over the years, with many tags becoming deprecated, and certain practices changing (e.g. use lowercase for tags; self-closing tags, etc.)

A great site to learn CSS is Westciv’s Complete CSS Guide — they offer paid tutorials, but the free stuff they have online is more than adequate to give you a thorough grounding.

Also, check out the Firefox extensions I mentioned above. And there are many good editors, both free and commercial, which will highlight your code in colors when you edit it, making it easier to see the structure, and many of which can validate your code as you work on it.

PS Do NOT use Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Word to create pages, and be wary of using any WYSIWYG tools to design web pages — unless you are can check and fix the code such tools generate (visual editors are a useful tool, but not good to rely on).