Validate using 3.2 or 4.0?

Brett says 3.2 in "Successful site in 12 months. . . "

[Web Footed Newbie]

I have studied Brett Tabke's 26 steps in "Successful site in 12 months with Google alone". Under "C" it says to validate html using 3.2. The Validator at search engine world is for 4.0.

Two questions: Is 4.0 now acceptable? If not, where can I validate using 3.2?
Thanks in advance for any help! :)
Web Footed Newbie

[Mohamed_E]

I would guess that almost everyone who validates uses 4.0 at least, there has been much discussion of validating with xhtml here, check out this Google search: [google.com...]

For what its worth I find Google site search easier to use than the forum's search function.

[andreasfriedrich]

>>Is 4.0 now acceptable?

Yes. The 3.2 suggestion is just Brett being careful and conservative. It might get better rankings though, I donīt know. Never tried it.

And Brett might have been referring to the fact that SEs will use mainly 3.2 elements when assigning different weight to different parts of the document. SEs will consider H1 [w3.org]..H6 [w3.org] elements, TITLE [w3.org] elements, etc. but not e.g. the LEGEND [w3.org] or FIELDSET [w3.org] elements.

>>If not, where can I validate using 3.2?

The W3C [w3c.org] validator will validate against all official HTML DTDs. You just need to declare which HTML version you use by putting a valid document type declaration at the top of each document.

Andreas

[g1smd]

As well as the !DOCTYPE declaration, you also need a meta tag to declare the character encoding used by the page.

See also: [webmasterworld.com...]