...you forgot to mention that these html errors are pretty much irrelevant since they don't interfere with rendering the document in a web browser, where most people will be using them.

When Netscape (and later Microsoft) decided that their browsers were going to be lenient on pages that did not contain valid HTML, I wonder if they realised what a huge can of worms they were opening. The vast majority of the web is now made up of badly constructed pages of invalid HTML.

When taken to task on this, the author's generally argue my that same way as you have, "but it works in both (sic) browsers" or "I'm not interested in the minority who use 'non-standard' browsers". Leaving aside the fact that there aren't just two browsers (and that there are many different versions of even the major two) and also the fact that there's no way that Netscape or IE can be described as 'standard' with any meaningful use of the term - there are two major flaws in this argument:

• In my experience, it's just as easy to create standard HTML as it is to create non-standard HTML. This is particularly true if you're using something like CGI.pm to create your HTML.
• Maybe now, most of your visitors are coming from Win32 PCs using IE5 or Netscape 4.x, but this situation is changing fast. The number of people surfing from Linux boxes is increasing all the time - and they have a much wider range of browsers to choose from. Also, what about the growing numbers of people surfing the web using PDAs or even WAP phones.

There's really no good reason not to produce valid HTML (or, even better, XHTML) and it will make your site far more accessible and flexible.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me