the w3c's validator vs. w3c's online specs

[bitterpants]

so, ive finally been shamed into seperating my content and my layout and formatting by using CSS instead of all kinds of crazy tables. in the process of learning all this, ive made a habit of checking my css files and my new html files w/the validators on the w3c web site. while trying to validate the html of a page with a form in it, it was returned invalid because of the textarea tag i had used. apparently this tag is invalid in html 4.x
so, in search of what i should be using instead i checked each html 4.x specification on the w3c.org site. all of them had textarea listed as a valid tag.
does anyone have any suggestion on perhaps what i should believe? is there someplace else im not thinking of where i can check to see what is really correct?
thanks.

[EscapeCharacter]

textarea is a valid tag, you might have an option that isnt standard, this happened to me some time ago when i was trying the same thing on my site. i deleted the depreciated attribute and all was well.

[Uranium-235]

bleh, I never try to be w3c compliant, first off they require alt text for all images *which is waaay too much work for lil' ol' me*. Second off, some JS tricks I use don't like it eather. so I don't even bother

[Strike]

Originally posted by Uranium-235
bleh, I never try to be w3c compliant, first off they require alt text for all images *which is waaay too much work for lil' ol' me*. Second off, some JS tricks I use don't like it eather. so I don't even bother
Then just make the src and the alt attribute the same (although this isn't the intent of the alt attribute, it's better than an empty one, assuming your pictures are named decently well). The intent of the alt attribute is for a few things:

* Text web browsers
* Screen readers
* When your image source is broken

Alternately, it's also what many browsers display on hovering over the image, though there are other ways of doing this.