Is there any real reason to be HTML 4.01 Transitional?

[rb4580]

I did a W3 Validator and it said I'm good as far as CSS but I'm not 4.01 Transitional. Any there any real reason to make this change?

[tedster]

It depends on what the reasons are that you don't validate as 4.01 transitional.

If your document has true errors - that is, the mark-up is not well-formed - then you may have troubles being rendered properly by at least some user agents (and that includes search engine spiders, by the way.)

On the other hand, if you just have some browser-specific mark-up in there that's just ignored by other browsers, it's not usually a big deal.

[g1smd]

Having looked at hundreds of sites over the last few years, I can say that there are only about a dozen or so basic coding errors that people do all the time. Learn what they are, and how to fix them, and you'll be able to fix 99% of all the errors out there.