Rincewind, I REALLY appreciate your patience. I do have a book on CSS
which I really did read cover to cover but some things are still a bit
confusing. The author recommended "Strict" but included a line for
"Transitional" and "Frameset" so I used "Transitional" when I the
validator said that my code did not comply with "Strict".
Unfortunately, there was no explanation of options within those DOCTYPE
declaration lines. So you're quite correct that I don't yet know the
various option combinations. Then the book goes on to an example of
declaring an XML namespace. It was the only example and did not
mention how it would be different for "Transitional" or "Frameset"
DOCTYPE. Thanks for bringing that discrepancy to my attention. I'll
need to research that topic further since making the changes that you
suggested, I'm still getting validator errors in that section.
I knew that I had to have alt titles for each image but I made the
wrong assumption that images linked to images would also require them.
I've removed those.
I could find no spaces between quotes and numbers for width and height
but in desperation, I did remove spaces from between the "=" and the
quotes with numbers.
Yes but you also have to change your CSS file, an id is prefixed with a #
a class is prefixed with a . and I notice that there are now no references
to id="mainimage" in your HTML file but that they are still in your CSS
file all you needed to do was change the repeated ID #'s for class .'s
I attempted to create a new class to float my multiple images and text
to the left but I see that the declaration in the css did not get
"saved". Rather than try again, I took your suggestion and tried to
just change the "id" to a class.
After all the changes above, I still have eight errors according to the
validator. Two of them are in the first couple lines again and the
rest are phantom spaces before numbers and now the inside the closing
img tags. I tried retyping line 27 and validator still comes up with
three errors (spaces that show up nowhere other than the validator
display).
The end result is that now none of the browsers display my floats
correctly. Somehow making all these corrections has had the opposite
effect that I had hoped for. Now I'm hoping that once the errors in
the first couple lines are corrected (and I don't have a clue as to
what the validator wants me to do about those) but eventually, it will
all fall into place and display properly at least in FireFox and Opera
like when I started this adventure. It is important for me to learn
these rules (particularly regarding the DOCTYPE declarations etc. ) so
I do hope you'll keep those suggestions coming to get me to that point.