HTML code is rather forgiving. Forget to close a tag, it might not be bold or italics, but it won't kill your page code. Using External CSS makes a page simpler. But Ext CSS means its less forgiving for code. Imagine you have a regular page layout and a table, all set with Ext. CSS. But you have an HTML font code just because you haven't liked the solutions in CSS. So you go to validate your page and you see a ton of lines that all say:: " document type does not allow element "P" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag" Huh? The second to the LAST line in Validator says: "end tag for "FONT" omitted, but its declaration does not permit this" And though it doesn't say it outright, the last line says something like: 'Look at line 699, you dummy; the font tag is open right there but you didn't close it.' (Well, why didn't you tell me that first instead of saying applet, object, etc?) You could spend many days to find out what it means when Validator spits out garbage that seemingly only a machine can understand! But if you use Validator and make friends with it, you'll notice it has a quirk. (Of course, there's a reason for this: It reads a page downward, in order, but an error at line 699 can affect code above and below it. But we'll just call it a quirk as the explanation.) Fixing my missing /font tag cleared up all the other garbage that validator listed. Moral: In the validator, FIRST fix anything SIMPLE. That means, first look at the LAST one or two items that Validator lists as problems. Once fixed, re-validate. Everything else should clear up with fixing that one tag (assuming your CSS and the rest of the html is good). This can also apply to missing tr, td, div, etc. Judy