Hi Peter,
First off, I tried to get to your site a few times in the last half hour and can't pull it up. Without seeing your site or knowing which modules/components you have added, I can give you a possibility that a lot of our clients face.
Go get a cup of coffee causde this is going to take a bit to explain and longer to put into action.
We are developing a school site now using some of the edugeek ideas mixed with some of the joomlashack school site ideas, and should have something for people to see in the next week or so. Of course, in following with the edugeek crew and their fantastic work, we will be offering as opensource for free as well.
One of the inherent problem with joomla extensions and W3C validity is this:
Many extensions are actually written much the same way a joomla template is for displaying in the front end. They have their own css stylesheets and the works, which throws your entire validity schematic out the window once it is published.
Some extensions have other quirks which tend to muddy the validity waters as well
One good example is acajoom newsletter. By just publishing this one extension, you will receive at least two validity errors.
Acajoom is an excellent extension in my humble opinion, but as soon as it is published it throws the following into the body of your website.
…om/css/acajoom.css" type="text/css" /
Now, one of the most basic rules of valid design is that stylesheets belong in the head of your design, not in the body. So, in order to get around this you have to rework your template to include all of your stylesheets to all of your extensions in the head of the template along with your basic template_css.css
My suggestion:::::::
1) Forget about validity until you have all of your modules and components published exactly the way you want them
2) Once you finish the design, go back to the validator at
http://validator.w3.org/ and click on more options.
3) Choose the two options
Show Source
Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy
Not only will you see where all of your errors are, but you will get some good ideas about how to fix the errors. Make a backup of your template files and paste the code given as your index.php
If your site now validates and also works (the most important part) then you're done until you add more modules/components. If it doesn't work, then you simply reload your backup and begin fixing the code a couple of problems at a time and testing as you go.
The truth, validated websites are VERY possible within the Joomla structure. The difficulty is that the more extensions you publish the more difficult it becomes to validate. If you're willing to put the time into it, you can do it, and it will be a wonderful way to really get to know the framework your cms and extensions run from.
Once you learn a trick for a particular module, make sure you make a note of it for future use and every time you do it you will find it takes less time because you will know what you are looking for.
Told you this would take a while, but hope it helps. Many thanks to the guys at edugeek for working so hard to give us the school package. This group, to me, epitomizes what opensource is supposed to be about.
Peace,
David
