W3C validation error: 'document type does not allow element "div" here; missing one of "object", "ins", "del", "map", "button" start-tag'

Question

My source code is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="it" lang="it">
    <head>
        <title>Hi</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <div id="content">
        <a href="product_displayer.cgi">
          <div style="background-image: url('../res/images/background.jpeg')">
              <img src="../res/images/products/thumbnails/image.png" alt="hello"/>
              <p>Hello hello hello</p>
          </div>
        </a>
      </div>
    </body>
</html>

If I try to validate the code, the W3C validator giving me this error:

document type does not allow element "div" here; missing one of "object", "ins", "del", "map", "button" start-tag

How can I solve it?

Best to just put <!DOCTYPE html> (and drop the xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="it" part). XHTML 1.0 is long obsolete now. — sideshowbarker
@sideshowbarker You assume that the OP's file has a MIME type of text/html. In that case, dropping the xmlns is OK. However, if this is an XHTML file (with MIME type application/xhtml+xml) the browser definitely needs this attribute! — Mr Lister

Quentin Quentin · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-19T10:31:00

    <a href="product_displayer.cgi">
      <div style="background-image: url('../res/images/background.jpeg')">

In XHTML 1, you cannot have a div inside an anchor.

Either don't use a div (or a paragraph) or use HTML 5 which does allow that.

W3C validation error: 'document type does not allow element "div" here; missing one of "object", "ins", "del", "map", "button" start-tag'

1 Answers