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I love having the validator. Thanks for a great tool. My understanding is that almost anything between a <textarea> and </textarea> tag is merely displayed on the web page, and is not parsed in any way. I have a textarea that is pre-filled with html, including doctype, table, and other elements. These cause the W3 validator to choke and emit lots of error messages when most of them are not any errors. I acknowledge that I am not an expert. I did confer with a couple of other programmers who do HTML from time to time, and we think this may be an actual validator bug. (Nothing turned up when I searched the bug list for "pre-filled textarea".) Thanks! Don
textarea element does not "accept" anything. It is defined as accepting CDATA, in other words, plain text only. If you want html stuff in there, you'll have to escape it. See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2007Aug/thread.html#msg143