HTML 5 and XML: Strict Adherence

SiteLinker expects a version of HTML 5 that must follow the strict XML syntax in order to automatically process your web pages. This means that, unlike many versions of HTML, you must ensure that:

Every Tag is Closed

Every tag has a closing tag. Thus, for every paragraph tag <p> you must have a corresponding </p>, list items each start with <li> and end with </li>, etc. Tags that do not enclose anything (such as the IMG tag) must terminate with />, as in:

Attributes are Enclosed in Quotes

Attribute values must be surrounded with quotes. For example, note that the <link/> tag below quotes all its attributes:

You will get an error if the quotation marks are missing.

Special Elements Still Follow the Rules

Some elements (notably pre-checked checkboxes) may look a little different than what you're used to seeing in HTML:

<input type="checkbox" checked="checked">Already Done!</input>

Escape special XML characters

For example, the & character tells your browser to expect a special character code to follow. So if you really want to display an ampersand, you must substitute & instead.

Another special character is the less-than sign (<). In this case, use < to display it.

SiteLinker will generally not let you save a file that contains incorrectly-formed XML; an error message will be displayed, and you will not be able to close the editor until it is resolved. The exception to this is when you are using the Entire File Source editor, which will ask you if you really want to save the file with errors. This same editor is the only one available when the file cannot be processed because of such errors.