end tag for element "div" which is not open? html validation errors?

Question

Hi

Does anyone know what these mean, I'm validating my website but I'm getting these weird messages about tags. I have and opening div at the top of the page but I still get these errors? Are they false warnings?

Thanks for all your help

Regards Judi

#  Error  Line 195, Column 7: end tag for element "div" which is not open

    </div><!-- wrapper -->

The Validator found an end tag for the above element, but that element is not currently open. This is often caused by a leftover end tag from an element that was removed during editing, or by an implicitly closed element (if you have an error related to an element being used where it is not allowed, this is almost certainly the case). In the latter case this error will disappear as soon as you fix the original problem.

If this error occurred in a script section of your document, you should probably read this FAQ entry.

#  Error  Line 195, Column 7: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: body line 16 and div

    </div><!-- wrapper -->


# Error Line 208, Column 8: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: html line 2 and body

 </body>

Answer 1

You would have to delete that </div> as it doesn't seem to have an opening match. Try to erase it and revalidate.

Answer 2

You should have an open div tag like

<div></div>

Answer 3

The most common reason for the validator to say that the tags don't match is that the tags don't match. However, it's not certain that the tag is actually missing, there may be other errors that could cause the ending tag to be skipped. You might for example have a missing ending quote for an attribute in a tag, which would cause the following tags to be part of the attribute value until the next quote in the code.

Verify that the page contains the correct opening and closing tags. You can open the page in something like FireBug in Firefox or Developer Tools in IE 8 to see how it displays the tag structure that the browser has parsed.

Answer 4

It thinks it found a closing tag with no matching opening () tag.

It may be that the page author deleted the opening tag and forgot to delete the closing tag. It could also be that you have tags mis-nested, something like this:

<h1>
<div ...>

...

</h1>
</div>

Hope that helps.